This week, Stephen Frears‘ affectionate, lightweight Meryl Streep vehicle “Florence Foster Jenkins” comes caterwauling into theaters. It marks another notch on Streep’s “irrepressible matron” belt, and another solid crowdpleaser from Frears, who here, as so often in the past, seems content to serve his stars and his story before necessarily putting a particularly recognizable authorial stamp on the material. That could seem like a damning observation, but actually it’s central to what makes Frears such an interesting director: We’re firmly on the record as loving a cinematic polyglot, and Frears’ flexible aesthetic and seemingly vast field of interests has contributed to one of the most richly eclectic filmographies among modern mainstream directors.
But that wouldn’t mean much if he hadn’t made more than a handful of exceptionally strong films. To think about the British director for even a few moments is to find yourself remembering just how many different genres, budget levels and types of film he has worked in (and that’s not even counting his extensive television work), and how very often he’s turned in a touchpoint title or two within each. Sometimes, especially with his later, higher-profile Hollywood work, they’re movies you might not immediately attribute to the filmmaker first (he is very much an actor’s director, so you may find yourself thinking of his movies as “belonging” to their stars), but no one lucks into that many terrific performances, into that many great movies. Here, as much to redress our own neglect thus far as to celebrate the release of his latest film, are our 10 favorite films from Stephen Frears, one of the most accomplished but least showy of showmen.
10. “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” (1987)
Like the London it portrays, Frears’ second collaboration with writer Hanif Kureishi after “My Beautiful Laundrette” is less a melting pot than a volatile admixture of social issues, cultures and classes refracted through the story of one interracial open marriage. Sammy (Ayun Khan-Din) and Rosie (Frances Barber) are a bohemian yet bourgeois couple — the type who live proudly in a disadvantaged neighborhood but attend semiotics lectures for fun — who both have sex with other people in the name of “freedom and commitment,” the “pillars” of their relationship. But then Sammy’s father Rafi (Shashi Kapoor), a compromised Pakistani politician, comes to stay with them, partially to escape disgrace and death threats at home, partially to rekindle a romance with Alice (Claire Bloom), the woman he loved and left decades before at Cambridge. Meanwhile Sammy’s current extra-marital squeeze becomes more demanding, and Rosie takes up with Danny (Fine Young Cannibals singer Roland Gift), a young rootless black man who sometimes calls himself Victoria and lives in a makeshift shanty town nearby that is about to be demolished. The novelistic expanse of Kureishi’s script proves just too unwieldy to satisfy as a film, and the performers can’t always strike a believable tone given their characters’ jack-knifing reactions and dialogue that is less conversation than poli-sci treatise on the legacy of colonialism in Thatcher’s Britain. But perhaps because of its very messiness (it would make a fascinatingly contrasting thematic double bill with the pristine formalism of “High-Rise“), it feels oddly vital in the Brexit era: a queasy, ragged evocation of personal and interpersonal disintegration as a direct result of social instability.
9. “The Snapper” (1993)
There are elements of “The Snapper” that betray its TV provenance — it was shot for BBC but then gained a theatrical release — and it doesn’t have quite the same cinematic scope of its predecessor, Alan Parker‘s “The Commitments.” But the film, which is based on the second of Irish author Roddy Doyle‘s “Barrytown Trilogy” (sandwiched between “The Commitments” and “The Van,” which Frears would film in 1996 to lesser effect) has a good-humored comic energy and a secret weapon in Colm Meaney‘s Golden Globe-nominated performance, both enough to power it through its more soap-operatic tendencies. It’s the story of a ramshackle family in a working class Dublin suburb, and the fallout after the daughter, Sharon (Tina Kellegher), becomes pregnant but won’t tell, in the parlance of the film, “who she’s having it for.” But the story is less a whodunit than a buzzy and ultimately fond look at family and especially fatherhood in a small, gossipy but not unduly unkind community. It was the first screenplay that Doyle adapted solo from his own work (“The Commitments” was co-written by British television stalwarts Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais) and that does show in the theatrical and somewhat overwritten nature of many of the scenes, especially those featuring a larger ensemble. But when Frears gets to pare the chatter down to the back-and-forth between a couple of characters, the film really sings, especially when one of those characters is the frazzled, foulmouthed but innately goodhearted father, played with bearish lovability by Meaney.
8. “Philomena” (2013)
There’s the edgy, urban Frears of the early years, and there’s the rather cozier version we’ve seen more often in the 2000s, and this sleeper hit, a true story about an aging woman’s search for the son she was forced to give up for adoption, certainly falls into the latter camp. But the director’s light touch with the heavy material, a sensitive screenplay from Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, and two very strong central performances transform what could easily be an insufferable wallow in bathos into a genuinely warm and moving film, animated by a thin vein of righteous, but never self-righteous, anger at the institutional corruption of the Catholic Church. Philomena (peak, Oscar-nominated Judi Dench, irascible and heartbreaking all at once) teams up with floundering journalist Martin Sixsmith (Coogan, resisting any urge to be overtly likable or heroic in the role of the would-be likable hero) to track down the son who was taken away from her while she worked off the “shame” of her unwed pregnancy in a convent laundry in Ireland. The search takes them to America, where the discovery that her son died eight years before, having been told she had abandoned him is only the most crushing of a series of revelations. And yet Frears gently guides the film toward being a crux of forgiveness and catharsis, recognizing how seemingly ordinary people can surprise you with their grace and goodness, even when the most massive institutional forces are against them.