Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
What if a Western was set in Nottingham and was a rom-com? Well, that’s an odd question, you weirdo, but turns we have the answer in Meadow’s 2002 joint Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. The stranger from out of town in this case is Begbie, or, well, Robert Carlyle’s Jimmy, who has seen the love of his life, Shirley Henderson’s Shirley turn down a televised proposal from her current boyfriend Rhys Ifans’s Dek. So affected is he by this that he abandons his fellow gang members, headed by James Cosmo’s Billy, when a clown robbery goes wrong. It may or may not have been official clown business. Hard to say.
Fleeing the cops, and eventually his gang, he tries to inveigle his way back into Shirley’s life, and that of his daughter’s, much to Dek’s discontent. He’s seemingly far too soft to stand up to Jimmy’s hard man act, and suffers a collapse of self esteem. Much of the film is then focused on Dek building up his courage to confront Jimmy and save his relationship with Shirley, which is perhaps also echoed in the strained supporting relationship between Jimmy’s foster sister, Kathy Burke’s Carol, and Ricky Tomlinson’s Charlie.
Like a lot of Meadows’ work, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands is not exactly over-encumbered with plot, this having more or less the minimum viable frameworks to bounce a few characters together, and I suppose it works well enough for what it needs to do. While it does have more than a few moments of emotional and dramatic heft, for the most part it’s kept fairly light and breezy and makes for an enjoyable, if not life-changing or genre-redefining experience.
Carlyle and Henderson come out of this the best, really, portraying a fairly believable experience and getting across the reasons for their previous attractions and break up well enough through small actions and reaction, rather than exposition dumps. Rhys Ifans’s Dek is rather less well served, and perhaps a touch too broadly written and played, but I suppose that rather goes with the genre territory.
Overall, I’m not sure there’s an awful lot more to meaningfully say about Once Upon a Time in the Midlands – it’s a reasonably enjoyable comedy, that refreshingly eschews the mawkishness that similar works like Brassed Off and The Full Monty arguably tended towards, if my memory serves. And you and I know, there’s no guarantee that it does.
Worth watching, but by no means the most vital part of Meadows body of work. A left shin, perhaps.