Getting It Right movie review (1989)

At first we can't get a reading on Gavin. He is pleasant, friendly, a little standoffish. Life doesn't seem to have happened to him yet. The character is played close to the vest by Jesse Birdsall, a young actor who manages to look thoroughly ordinary most of the time and sublimely crafty the rest of the time. It's a performance a little like Dustin Hoffman's in "The Graduate," where society is criticized by the character's very indifference to it.

One day Gavin is taken to a party that seems to be a last-gasp attempt to resurrect Swinging London. It's held in the spectacular penthouse of a garish divorcee (Lynn Redgrave), whose red wig and outlandish costumes look like a conscious attempt to keep people at arm's length. But she likes Gavin, takes pity on him and invites him to a secret inner sanctum in the vast apartment - the only room, apparently, where she feels free to take off her wig and be herself.

Her secret identity turns out to be sweet and tender, and Gavin is started down the road toward losing his virginity and gaining his independence.

There is another woman at the party - a girl, really - who is dark and intense and small and determined. Her name is Minerva Munday (Helena Bonham Carter), and her father is fearsomely old and rich and eccentric (John Gielgud). Suddenly, Gavin is catapulted out of his safe orbit of the hairdressing salon and life with mum and dad, and finds his romantic life more eventful than he could have dreamed.

"Getting It Right" is a character film, not a plot film, and so the point is not what happens, but who it happens to. The screenplay is by Elizabeth Jane Howard, based on her novel, and it shows a novelist's instinct for character and dialogue. This is not one of those mechanically plotted forced marches through film-school script formulas, but a story that lives and breathes and gives the characters the freedom to surprise us.

Smaller roles, like Peter Cook's cameo as the owner of the hairdressing salon, are enriched with asides that suggest the entire character. And some of the characters sneak up on us - like Jenny (Jane Horrocks), who is Gavin's assistant at the salon. He has barely looked at her in two years, but now, emboldened by his late flowering, he looks at everyone in a new light, and Jenny begins to blossom.