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Suppose you entered a screening of Topsy-Turvy with no knowledge of its director. (Pretend also that you spent the director-revealing opening credits in the bathroom.) You might expect a whirlwind cinematic tour of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, its surface lavishly period, the productions themselves separated by banter between the two icons, perhaps a dash of romance, a false crisis, a false dawn, a real crisis, a real dawn, so on, so forth, done in time for dinner. You might thus expect a garish, unsubtle mess, but your expectations would, happily, be disappointed. Everything would fall into place when you learned the name of the man so flagrantly defying your assumptions: none other than Mike Leigh.
In his very selection of the project, Mike Leigh defies assumptions about Mike Leigh. Opting to focus closely on the difficulties of being a chatty socialist in modern-day urban England's seedy underbelly, his typical films have little energy remaining to examine the creative struggles of famed Victorian composers and librettists. The ostensible clash between creator and material works here to the good, however, as Leigh's keen eye for social dynamics and contempt for triviality lock in no less steely a fashion onto Gilbert, Sullivan and milieu they have has anyone else. Though it remains unclear, exactly, in how much cultural esteem Leigh holds the likes of H.M.S. Pinafore, his respect for and interest in the long, uncertain gestation of theater itself, now vividly committed to celluloid, lies well beyond question.
As cinematic experiments go, few sound more fascinating than the effective re-creation of the work of 1884's Mike Leigh equivalent. If any movie could be expected to deliver that, here it is. Unfortunately, the burden of constructing Gilbert and Sullivan's London — or at least, given the picture's relative thrift, a couple dozen of its interiors — seems to have necessitated a substantial, though not totally enervating, alteration of the filmmaker's method. Where the relatively low rate of budget percentage spent per minute in a film like Naked accommodates extended, no-depth-off-limits character plumbing, Topsy-Turvy's visual and historical complication forces Leigh's hand to keep the crank turning. Scene after scene stops just short of achieving the satisfying fullness that is Leigh's standard. None are ruined, but it's hard to banish the mental image of a glowering producer tapping away at his wristwatch's face.
The choice to cover only a brief cut of Gilbert and Sullivan's collective career ameliorates this haste somewhat. Rather than performing the workman's trudge from Thespis to The Grand Duke, Leigh concentrates on the final, floundering days of Princess Ida and the conception and execution of its much more successful follow up, The Mikado. I feared a falsely drama'd-up rendition of the facts — a backstage fistfight here, an inconvenient love triangle there, and bam, boffo B.O. — but no such misfortune. The story hews reasonably close to the history, eschewing theatrical roil for the roil of the theater: the pain, craftsmanship and unlikely intellectual point-counterpoint involved in bringing an elaborate (if now slightly embarrassing) show to life.
But it's what goes on in front of the scenes rather than behind them that lifts Topsy-Turvy into the rarefied ranks of pictures about theater that also manage to contain theater. Films about the creation of any internal work of art tend to disappoint when it comes to the work of art itself: most of the time, when the big painting or monument or tapestry or, indeed, stage production is finally revealed, we furrow our brows, wondering what all the fuss could possibly have been about; not this flimsy, unreal construction, certainly. No such skimpy artificiality for Topsy-Turvy, which presents its selections of The Mikado as the real deal, a piece of theater with all its material detritus, logistical heft and seemingly Sisyphean reiterative sculpting. And the substance of the developmental material matches that of the performative: One scene, quite possibly the picture's best, has Gilbert looping three actors through a mere scrap of the script, wittily but sternly correcting, prompting, adjusting and perfecting.
For all Leigh's deft handling of the subject, he doesn't reach far below the surface of its large cast of characters. Would that another 30 minutes — at the least — could have been spent on the working relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan, whose onscreen interactions feel like the tip of the iceberg's tip. The film also falls victim to an infatuation with the illustration of its own period technology: a dentist works crudely with pliers, a pen that contains its own ink isn't quite believed, telephones are shouted into. (We're at least spared "ahoy hoy.")
But the picture skillfully executes maneuvers that most others of its kind find unmanageable, which mostly bleaches out any misplaced priorities. As a cinematic examination of theater, it both manages to operate with a genuine interest in it and treat it with a respect not often afforded one medium by its successor. And while Leigh seriously observes the human core of a Gilbert and Sullivan production, he avoids treating the men themselves with a fanboy's dour over-regard. Perhaps he errs too far in the opposite direction, but every showman knows you've got to make 'em laugh.
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