Movie Reviews : ‘Getting It Right’ Locks Into Wiggy Comedy

In “Getting It Right” (citywide), a sprightly new comedy based on the Elizabeth Jane Howard novel, Jesse Birdsall plays a punctilious young London hairdresser named Gavin Lamb who lives at home, still a virgin at 31.

Gavin, a lamb with shears, keeps talking himself out of a sex life, though customers swoon over him and dazzling young women give him the eye. And he’s locked in one of those quasi-incestuous home tangles with a domineering mother (Pat Heywood), a quiet father and a roomful of books, records and reproductions of Degas.

You’d suspect from all this that Lamb had homosexual tendencies--and indeed, in the film, he has a bewigged, bitchy boss (Peter Cook) and his best friend is a gay makeup man, Harry (Richard Huw).

But, instead, Gavin’s a volcano of raging heterosexuality about to explode, just as the movie itself, superficially descended from the anti-Establishment British comedies of the ‘60s--”Morgan!” “Georgy Girl,” “The Knack” and others--has by its climax turned into a conformist parable.

You keep getting the idea that director Randal Kleiser (“Grease”) wanted to make a wilder picture, wanted to think himself back to the the heyday of youth and rebellion, the swinging ‘60s, but that the ‘80s kept getting in his way, bringing him down.

It’s not an unmixed curse, or blessing. Writer Howard, whose dialogue is often spring-fresh, delicately satiric and balletically graceful and swift, writes Gavin as a sensible, decent, highly moral young man, suddenly cast adrift in a sea of sex and temptation.

At a posh party held by a designer’s mistress (Lynn Redgrave), he is half-seduced by his hostess and then stumbles into a bedroom where a naked aristocrat (Helena Bonham Carter of “A Room with a View”) lies flirtatiously in bed, while Harry’s butch lover Winthrop cavorts with a Greek pickup in the bathroom.

There’s a triple wish-fulfillment here. Naughtily stylish Joan deflowers him and madcap rich ditz Minerva wants to marry him, dragging him home to starchy daddy John Gielgud and her drunken mum. There’s a third pull, sunny normality. Gavin surprises his hair-shop helper and shampoo girl Jenny (Jane Horrocks) feeding swans, and joins her on a sweet, slow courtship full of flowers, music and lilting long-take strolls. An unwed mother, Jenny lives at home too, but, next to her rivals, she is a working-class madonna, closer to Lillian Gish than Judy Geeson.

The first part of “Getting It Right” has an easygoing wit and casual humanism, especially all the scenes involving Redgrave, and Gielgud’s fierce turn as a rich, fragile bully. (In his old age, Gielgud has turned into a Paganini of archly delicate comic effects.)

But in the second half, there’s an almost tangible slackening. The story skitters perfunctorily from scene to scene: Lady Minerva in drugged-out squalor, sudden romances and marriages. Birdsall is too young and confident for his part, and when the movie starts slipping and drifting, you notice it more.

It’s as if Kleiser and Howard had lost their grip or were trying to cram in too much, or as if Kleiser wanted to make something like “My Beautiful Laundrette” and had to switch it into “The Secret of My Success.”

There are some delightful moments in “Getting It Right,” but the film isn’t right at all. It suggests that you should have your fun but play it safe, and then it makes safeness banal, over-bright.

It’s a shorn lamb, fleeced of its chance for either true love or crazy glee.