[Chris O'Carroll]

No 4215

Set by Ian Birchall
You were asked for reviews of a 2052 biopic of David Cameron concentrating on the ending, which shows the former leader, physically and mentally enfeebled, looking back on his days of “glory”.

This week’s winners
What does a 2052 biopic mean to you? Yes, a film made 40 years in the future in which the former prime minister is, if still alive, aged 86. The biopic could be in honour of his long life while he still lives or made to celebrate his demise. Either was allowed. But the actors listed by some of you to play various parts in the film (Meryl Streep, by then 103; Cliff Richard, 112; Maggie Smith, 118; Bill Nighy, 103) will – unless medical advances come all in a rush – not be around to fulfil the potential you see for them in the drama of Cameron’s life. However, we had fun with the idea of “Stephen Fry Jr” from one comper. Hmm! This week, the winners can have £25 each, with the Tesco vouchers going, in addition, to Basil Ransome-Davies. Hon menshes to Tony Cheney (who chose “Sir Daniel Radcliffe” to star) and Richard Syms (“In these days of ultra-short attention spans this movie stretches to an epic seven minutes”).

All in It Together?
All in It Together? frames its narrative within a fictional dialogue between Lords Cameron (Daniel Craig) and Beckham (Benedict Cumberbatch) as they rest their arthritic limbs on red leather benches and trade memories of the former’s premiership. The film’s “spin” is generally favourable to Cameron: the horrendous disaster of the 2012 Olympics is airbrushed away and life in the controversial dosser settlements appears through a distinctly rose-coloured lens. As Conservative leader, his strength is underlined by the beating he deals out to Boris Johnson (a blond, CGI Vinnie Jones) in a Commons toilet – a scene shot with Peckinpah-like attention to gory detail but it’s a dramatic trope for their differences, not fact. This is cinema dealing with recent history that has a mission to entertain.
G M Davis

Richie Rich: Generations
This film redeems Macaulay Culkin’s long career. As the slack-jawed David Cameron, looking around his deserted house, Culkin conjures up a figure still obsessed with the chimerical “bigness” of society, still egging on his last loyal servants to help one another out, as they strive, ever unpaid, to polish his figurines and mementoes. The flashbacks to the defenestration and lynching of Nick Clegg are skilfully and comically timed, as the fading Cameron (always shot in sepia) repeats “You know” and “Come on”, as gently as an egg poaching in lukewarm water. Although the film is overlong at 32 minutes, it does capture the bland, fantasyfilled delusions that filled the leader’s flirtations with autophotography. “I am a Cameron,” he remarks, as the last of his furniture is carted away.
Bill Greenwell

Posh Boy
At 78, Leonardo DiCaprio needs no prosthetic enhancement to play the aged David Cameron in his latest bid for that elusive Oscar. Posh Boy opens with the ex-PM lighting a spliff in his suite at the Ernest Bevin Sunset Home, Eastbourne, while musing on the past. “Shit, man,” he drools. “Social democracy saved us, after all. Ironic or what?” And that’s all he says. As the film flashes back, a dynamic montage displays its hero’s salient achievements – the victory over Andorra, the trial and execution of the Lib Dem “renegades” – but its climax is the rallying of the English to support the Scottish People’s Liberation Army in founding the republic, so magnanimous in victory. Eddie Izzard’s cameo (in a moving flashback) as Rupert Murdoch shines.
Basil Ransome-Davies

A Man for All Seasoning
The title A Man for All Seasoning, refers to its subject’s reputation for blandness. The film features bravura performances by the veteran actor Daniel Radcliffe and his son, Daniel Radcliffe II, who plays the younger Cameron. Such casting inevitably leads to a Hogwarts-and-all interpretation of the former prime minister’s life. Both actors try to resemble Cameron – stuffing in cheeks, hair quiffs and so on – and viewers feel as if they’re watching less a biopic than a baby biopic. The increasingly torrid relationship between the coalition partners is lightly done, though the final scene is moving. Here, the aged Cameron sees, in his mind’s eye, his younger self and Nick Clegg mount their broomsticks and fly up into the sunset as if off to a game of political Quidditch.
M E Ault