“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.” John 15: 11
Sometimes a dip into contemporary culture can affirm the gospel message of joy. For a rollicking dollop of it, see “Wicked Little Letters,” a British film which has been showing in theaters, and maybe by now is streaming. Olivia Colman stars and gives us her first dire glimpse of religion along the lines of, “if our Blessed Savior suffered, then we who must suffer grow closer to him.” It might not be so funny if it weren’t expressed with such eye-rolling piety. Olivia plays Edith Swan, who lives with her parents in the early 1920s and has been beset by a plague of anonymous nasty letters.
The film is more or less based on a true story of the Littlehampton Libels, a scandal in Sussex filled with battling neighbors and lots of profanity. (If this bothers you, then the movie may not be your cuppa.) Edith and her parents immediately blame their neighbor, Rose Gooding. She’s a perfect target: rambunctious, irreverent, bawdy, obscene, often drunk, and newly arrived from Ireland. It’s enough to swing the townspeople and police into glorious self-righteousness. In the real case, Rose was convicted and served four months in Portsmouth Prison. But the letters to many people continued, and the issue was not so neatly resolved.
Enter policewoman Gladys Moss, who with an unlikely and hilarious band of women detectives cleverly cracks the case. Edith Swan remains a model of stiff propriety, flinching at the disgusting language she must nobly endure. But as her domineering father becomes more emotionally abusive, and she appears more repressed, one starts to wonder… When a grown woman is forced to copy out Bible verses as punishment for some minor infringement, might she in turn spew venom with glee?
To question any more might reveal deliciously wicked plot twists. See for yourself, and may your joy be complete.
Kathy Coffey 