Richard E. Grant is a deliciously diabolical famous author at the center of Friday’s English thriller “The Lesson,” a knowing portrait of a fractured upper-class English family.
“It’s a chamber piece, just four characters in this hermetically sealed world in which my character just sucks as a very successful novelist.” Grant, 66, explained from London in a Zoom interview last week.
Grant’s J.M. Sinclair has many issues, including his fear that he can’t satisfactorily finish his new novel. He hires a tutor for Bertie, his emotionally awkward teenage son, to prep him for his Oxford entrance exam. The tutor (Ireland’s breakout star Daryl McCormack via “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” opposite Emma Thompson) is actually a wannabe writer.
“He’s invited into the nest and just causes mayhem,” Grant said. While Sinclair is “seen falling from great entitlement and pride, crushed by his own shenanigans and subterfuges.
“As he’s in the twilight zone of his life, he’s surrounded by everybody who is faster, younger and stronger. That charges the relationship that Sinclair has with the young writer. That feeling of being forced to pass on to the younger guard from the old guard is, to quote Disney, ‘a tale as old as time.’
“His unwillingness to relinquish his position, especially to hold on to it — we see that in Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the most extreme. I don’t know if that’s something that was particularly male, but it certainly characterizes this family dynamic.
“Also the family is imploded by the suicide of their teenage son, who was the favorite son. And instead of unifying them in their grief, it’s flung them to the four corners of this house. They may be in physical close proximity when they’re eating dinner but it is charged with unspoken verbal, visual blame of the other family members. Their verbal spit-firing is more lethal than anything they do with a knife and fork.”
Although Grant’s career goes back decades and he was Oscar-nominated for “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” “Lesson” seems destined for a special place in his heart.
“This family is in a constant state of grief,” he said of the film, “and my wife of 38 years had died six months before I made this movie. Being in the headspace and the emotional state of a tsunami of grief that you have to engage on a daily basis, that was really going on beneath the surface of the story. It was, in essence, a kind of gift to be able to do that.”
