NEW YORK — By the time a film arrives on movie screens, its makers often strive to find ways to articulate how relevant it is, how it speaks to now. But that’s not so easy when your movie is about a handful of people off the coast of Wales brought together by old songs.
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Yet one of many charms of “The Ballad of Wallis Island” is that it has no intentions of timeliness. It has nothing to do with “now,” which, in a way, might make it all the better suited to today.
“Weirdly, it’s not a right-now movie, but that’s what makes it a right-now movie. Hopefully it’s heartwarming, and everything’s falling apart at the moment,” says Tim Key, who co-stars in and co-wrote the film with Tom Basden. “So I guess that’s a good thing.”
“The Ballad of Wallis Island,” which Focus Features released Friday in theaters, stars Basden as Herb McGwyer, a famous folk musician turned pop star who, in the opening scenes, arrives at the rural seaside home of Charles (Key) for a private £500,000 ($647, 408) gig. After his chipper host helps him off the skiff and into the water (“Dame Judi Drenched,” Charles pronounces), Herb learns he’ll be performing for “less than 100” people.
Just how significantly less unspools over the gentle, funny and sweetly poignant “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” the springtime movie release that may be most likely to leave audiences saying: “I needed that.”
“Both of us have felt there’s a case to be made for stuff that isn’t relevant, that isn’t satirical, that isn’t a comment on the story of the day,” says Basden. “Those are the films that have meant the most to me over the years. They’re the ones that let me escape from the here and now. But it’s not always easy to get people to see it that way when you’re getting things made.”
This image released by Focus Features shows promotional art for the film “The Ballad of Wallis Island.” (Focus Features via AP)
“The Ballad of Wallis Island” is, itself, a product of time. It’s based on a 2007 short that Key and Basden made together when they, and director James Griffiths, were just starting out in show business.
All three have since gone on to their respective, often overlapping careers. Key and Basden began in sketch comedy (their group was called the Cowards) and have been regular presences across offbeat British comedy. Key co-starred in Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge series and hosted a comic poetry hour radio show with Basden providing musical accompaniment. Basden, who created the BBC sitcom “Here We Go,” has, among other things, written plays, including a riff on Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” starring Key.
When Basden and Key, now in their 40s, made 2007’s “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island,” they knew little of what lay ahead for them, let alone much about how to make a movie.
“I don’t have any sort of discernable haircut,” says Key looking back. “I’m wearing my father’s cardigan.”
But while the premise — the soggy collision between cynical star and lonely superfan — was thin, the concept of the BAFTA-nominated short stuck with Key, Basden and Griffiths. Griffiths, who moved on to directing series like “black-ish,” “Stumptown” and “Bad Sisters,” wanted to revisit the short during the pandemic.
“Tim and Tom spent a lot of time in nature’s makeup chair. They’ve become the right age for the characters,” says Griffiths. “When we made the short, it was very much the idea of a sketch – an odd couple on an island. But over time, we’ve all grown up and as we’ve expanded on those characters, you start to see you’re commenting on your own lived experience.”
In the script, Key and Basden decided to only slightly expand the cast, most notably creating the role of Nell Mortimer, the former folk singing partner of Herb’s. The arrival of Nell, played by Carey Mulligan, brings up much about Herb’s past as part of the duo known as McGwyer Mortimer, who represent an authenticity in music Herb lost long ago.
This image released by Focus Features shows Tom Basden, from left, Carey Mulligan and Tim Key in a scene from “The Ballad of Wallis Island.” (Focus Features via AP)
For Charles, a genial pun-happy puppy dog of a man who says things like “Wowsers in your trousers,” McGwyer Mortimer’s music represents something nostalgic from an earlier relationship, too.
“You can probably tell from our characters in the film that Tim has a much more positive energy than me, generally,” says Basden. “And I have absolutely leaned on his optimism over the years to counteract my natural pessimism. I count myself very lucky that I have Tim in my life for that reason alone.
Mulligan, an executive producer on the film, didn’t hesitate to join despite, as Key says, “huge question marks over whether or not we could keep our composure with Carey Mulligan.”
“I was a huge Tim Key fan and Tom (fan). We were obsessed with the late-night poetry hour,” says Mulligan, who’s married to folk star Marcus Mumford. “Before I even read it, my husband was like, ‘You’ve got to do it.’”
Though Mulligan has starred in many films that speak more directly to their times (“She Said,” “Promising Young Woman,” “Suffragette”), she reveled in the the un-timeliness of “Wallis Island.” With it, Mulligan, a co-star in the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis,” becomes the rare actor to appear in not one but two movies about dissolved folk duos.
This image released by Focus Features shows co-writer/actor Tom Basden, from left, director James Griffiths and actor Carey Mulligan on the set of “The Ballad of Wallis Island.” (Alistair Heap/Focus Features via AP)
“It’s generous and it’s compassionate, and a reminder of what generosity can be and compassion can look like,” Mulligan says. “A big part of my attraction to it was its unseriousness and its lack of quote-unquote ‘importance.’ I was like, ‘I want to make something that’s just lovely.’”
Griffiths, who grew up enamored of the films of Bill Forsyth, was inspired by the much-adored 1983 “Local Hero,” which likewise centers around an outsider arriving on a far-away United Kingdom coastline. (In “Local Hero,” it’s Scotland.) Griffiths, who divorced in the intervening years, wanted to return to “Wallis Island” much as its characters are seeking to revive something from their past.
“You look back and go: ‘Oh, I got here and I didn’t expect to be making this kind of work,’” says Griffiths. “I wanted to press the reset button a little bit and make something I really wanted to make.”
How you make something sincerely heartwarming without tipping into over-sentimentality has bedeviled most Hollywood moviemakers for the better part of a century. In the case of “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” the key ingredient, perhaps, besides the abiding friendship of Key and Basden, was simply time.
“There’s something about going back to a project you made 18 years earlier and then realizing you’re making a film about people who are obsessed with their life 15 years earlier,” says Basden. “You’re like: Hang on a minute. I haven’t used my imagination at all.”
