Jonathan Butterell treats youthful enthusiasm with warmth and trusts his actors to make us care. His film debut is worth an evening, despite ordinary songs and thinly written opposition.
Fi1m perspective
In Everybody's Talking About Jamie (2021), Jonathan Butterell treats a young person's enthusiasm for drag as something to enjoy. The film is warm and uneven, worth an evening chiefly for Max Harwood and Sarah Lancashire. We were moved by the mother-and-son relationship, because their affection gives us something to care about when the songs begin to sound alike. Butterell lets that affection count without asking Jamie to apologise for what he enjoys.
His confidence with performers follows a substantial career in choreography and musical staging. His choreography for Sam Mendes's Company (1995) at the Donmar Warehouse marked an early turn from acting towards staging. Nine (2003), as choreographer, and The Light in the Piazza (2005), in musical staging, followed on Broadway. He developed the stage version of Everybody's Talking About Jamie (2017) with Dan Gillespie Sells and Tom MacRae before directing the film adaptation as his feature debut. The film's expanded settings and fantasy sequences show his willingness to rethink the stage production for the screen.
Christopher Ross's cinematography makes the bright musical passages inviting, while Jane Levick's production design gives the film a polish that sometimes makes its setting feel too agreeable. We enjoy the colour, but the gloss weakens our sense of the difficulties Jamie faces. MacRae's screenplay compounds the problem by making the resistance to Jamie so easy to understand and dismiss; Butterell has more success with the people supporting his central character than with those opposing him. The songs can sound much alike, too, leaving Harwood and Lancashire to provide much of the reason to stay interested.
The more surprising limitation, given Butterell's background, is how little time the film spends on drag as performance. We would have welcomed more opportunity to watch the work it is so keen to celebrate. That seems a useful challenge for another screen musical: give the performers more time to perform, alongside the care he takes over their relationships. Start with Jamie for Harwood and Lancashire, and allow for some ordinary songs.
Biography
Jonathan Butterell is an English choreographer, stage director and film director. He grew up in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, and began his career as an actor and dancer before working as a choreographer and movement director on productions including Company at the Donmar Warehouse and Othello at the Royal National Theatre.
Butterell developed and directed the stage musical Everybody's Talking About Jamie, which premiered at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in 2017 before transferring to the West End. He made his feature film directorial debut with the 2021 screen adaptation of the musical, also serving as a writer on the project. His earlier film work includes choreography on Finding Neverland (2004) and Stay (2005).
