Returning to the beloved character from her early ‘00s sketch comedy show “The Catherine Tate Show” — and the spinoff series “Catherine Tate’s Nan” — the simply titled “The Nan Movie” continues the hijinks of the elderly Joanie Taylor (aka Nan). A loudmouth cockney woman who always speaks her mind, often to the embarrassment of her grandson Jamie (Matthew Horne), Tate’s feature film is a curious object. Almost evenly split between wartime drama and present-day broad comedy, the film feels disparate, pieced from discarded ideas that were seemingly stitched together with little interest in narrative or tonal coherence.
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The only feature film in recent memory that has no credited director, “The Nan Movie” is perhaps more a curiosity for the clearly tumultuous behind-the-scenes problems that led to its finished form. Billed as a “Catherine Tate film” — a clear indication of Tate’s creative control over the character — it also features an executive producer credit from original director Josie Rourke (“Mary Queen of Scots”). Shelved for a few years, and now missing Rourke’s credit, “Nan the Movie” is obviously the product of dramatic reshoots and edits.
Is that amount of production context necessary to understand “The Nan Movie”? Not really, but it’s infinitely more interesting than what ended up on the screen. Split between flashbacks to WWII, where Nan and her sister Nell (Katherine Parkinson) compete for the affections of American officer Walter (Parker Sawyers) and a road trip that Nan takes with Jamie to reunite with her now estranged sister, the film is really two competing ideas juxtaposed against each other. The WWII flashbacks — the original narrative before producers decided to add more present-day slapstick — isn’t much of a comedy. Instead, it’s a quasi-realistic drama about life during wartime, with Tate showing impressive range. However, the present-day material sees the older Nan as a buffoon, getting into all manner of trouble including, but unfortunately not limited to: inadvertently taking drugs, a kidnapping plot, gross-out bodily humor, and an extended chase from a disgruntled police officer (Niky Wardley) .
If the flashbacks are, at least somewhat, nuanced, the present-day sections are so brutally unfunny that they could pass as performance art. We are given repeated scenes in which Nan falls in with a younger group — clubbers, rugby fans, etc. — where she manages to get herself into trouble, only for the film to rapidly move on to the next set-piece. Further, a number of these road trip scenes are animated, replacing Nan and Jamie with weird figures that look like someone cut out their likeness from a magazine and pasted it into the frame — bringing to mind a ransom note, a frankly apt metaphor for the film as a whole.
Why are large sections animated? No idea, but these moments are often either transitional or feature an expensive set-piece. If the entire film feels like the production Frankenstein-ed multiple scripts together, these moments especially highlight the hastily added post-production material. In fact, the entire film feels like a college essay that an undergrad turns in after an all-nighter, hoping that the individual parts might add up to something but, really, just happy to have hit the word count.
Besides Tate, the biggest draw might be a co-screenplay credit by “Ted Lasso” writer/co-star (and current Hercules) Brett Goldstein. Having worked on Tate’s Nan series previously, Goldstein’s credit makes sense and, if you squint just at the right moment, you can see the bones of an interesting take on the Nan character — a radically different origin story that embedded humor within a period piece and stretched the Nan character out of her broad comedy origins. That might’ve been an interesting film — or, at the very least, a fascinating failure. But, instead, “Nan the Movie” is just a series of scenes that make little sense when placed side-by-side. One day someone might write about this troubled production, bringing much-needed context to why “The Nan Movie” feels so haphazard and threadbare. However, until then, Tate’s film is nothing more than a bizarre hodgepodge of painfully unfunny scenes. [D]