'Guest of Honour' film review: Family drama puzzle box bores rather than intrigues
A story of wrongful conviction, suicide, revenge and the loss of a spouse/parent ... should not be as tedious or unnecessarily convoluted as the lethargic family drama 'Guest of Honour' (streaming as part of a virtual cinema starting July 24).
In short: Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira) recounts her distant and complicated relationship with her recently deceased father Jim (David Thewlis) to a Catholic priest (Luke Wilson).
Health inspectors ... do not make particularly compelling protagonists. Watching a health inspector inspect for health codes does not lend itself to gripping the audience's attention. Frankly, watching Jim inspect restaurants for the film's opening 15 minutes is monotonous. It's patently obvious this is designed to establish Jim's persona as a bit of a stickler - but there are more efficient and compelling methods of laying out who Jim was rather than subjecting the audience to the drudgery of Jim doing his job.
The film begins with Veronica discussing her father's funeral with Father Greg - everything that follows, in regard to Veronica and Jim's life, is revealed in flashbacks. The problem with this framing device is simple: it's wholly pointless. The movie itself largely forgets about this framing device for most of the first half of 'Honour.' It adds nothing of value, and merely exists to drop some lazy exposition. And in its worst moment, the conversation just ... explains some critical information that occurs off-screen. Just one character artlessly informing another character of ... facts.
The film's greatest failing is its utter failure to move the needle of dramatic tension - even as it resorts to a grab bag of melodramatic plot devices, turns and reveals. "Honour" plays like a lethargic mystery, as it lazily tries to build an air of mystery about Jim and Veronica. As the story progresses, "Honour" drops what should be major narrative reveals - and these moments never feel like the bombs they are intended to be ... they are duds that just land with a dull, uneventful thud. It’s shockingly difficult to even determine where this story is going in its opening 30 minutes, which is best characterized as cluttered and meandering.
The main problem is "Honour" simply has too many moving parts and never commits enough focus on any one plot element to adequately reveal why the audience should care about any one of these individual "bombshell" moments. Any single one of this film's massive melodrama swings could be the focus of an engrossing story - but "Honour" treats them as b-plots that just come and go.
Beneath all the competing noise of plot elements fighting for attention, "Honour" is fundamentally rooted in a father and daughter desperately trying to understand one another's actions. This core theme is not just buried under a multitude of loud, obnoxious and underdeveloped plot points - "Honour" forces the audience to endure the monotony of their lives in drawn-out scenes that go nowhere ... while dropping its most important plot points merely as dialogue. Not even well-crafted prose or elegant wordsmithing - just one character plainly explaining facts to another character.
Final verdict: A film supposedly rooted in resentment, betrayal, false witness, blackmail among many other things, "Honour" is somehow, against all odds, as dull as reading a municipality's entire health codes.
Score: 2/5
'Guest of Honour' streams as a Virtual Cinema featured presentation starting July 24. This drama is not rated and has a running time of 105 minutes.
