If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Absolutely Fantastic

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

PICCADILLY JIM is one of my favorite Wodehouse books. It's a non-series novel with the concomitant flaws of early Wodehouse. But the story has Wodehouse's most masterly "impostor" plot where a young man is introduced as a guest into a private home masquerading ... as himself. If you want an explanation, see this movie and all will be made clear.The cast is excellent. Sam Rockwell enters the Wodehouse world with surprising aplomb as Jimmy. Tom Wilkinson is superb as his father, an ex-pat American married to a woman (improbably) trying to buy him a title; but he misses baseball so much he sails home pretending to be a butler. Rockwell and Wilkinson have a tremendous rapport. Meanwhile, the real butler (Geoffrey Palmer) is assumed to be Rockwell's father by Francis O'Connor as the love interest. All clear? No? Good! The movie remains strangely loyal to Wodehouse's convoluted story, tinkering with it here and there for clarity. It's played up to the hilt, but none of the actors (even Hugh Bonneville, the worst offender as a German spy never quite goes over the top--though given the setting of the movie and the time the book was written it's never clear whether he's working for the Nazis or the Kaiser in trying to steal a new secret bomb formula, a little thing Wodehouse threw in just for added confusion).The problem most people have with this flick is the problem I feared I might have. And it's a perfectly valid criticism. Read on.While this Wodehouse is thankfully set in the 1930s (actually, PICCADILLY JIM was written a lot earlier, but we'll let that pass) it is a thirties that never existed except in the beautifully deranged minds of the designers. It's an alternative-history thirties, done in steampunk style. These thirties were never as they were (certainly no one seems to feel there's a depression on) but as they should have been were they more like the twenty-first century.For instance, the London nightclub Jimmy (Rockwell) goes to meet Ann (O'Connor) is playing ersatz swing music, far too booming to be real swing, and is sung by a singer with WAY too much decolletage for the period, but it works. They throw in just enough of the real thirties to make you buy the weird hairdos and clothes and far-outrageous Decco sets.The trick is not to take any of it seriously. It's a feast for the eyes. Sit back and enjoy it--at least the story is mostly straight.The worst result in this bastardized mix certain moral attitudes. The best of Wodehouse was free of post-Freudian angst. Even couples seeking engagement were not driven by sexual hankerings. Therefore, it is shocking when sexual activity is implied (which it is early on, but not so much later on). This is a liberty with the text I personally disliked, but is less unseemly with this bizarre 1930s/2000s blend.MAJOR SPOILER: As some reviewers have pointed out, the actual butchery of Wodehouse is a single change in the plot. And it's not a small alteration. Jimmy (Rockwell) was "Piccadilly Jim" who wrote little pieces for the paper. As in Wodehouse, Jimmy is now sacked and someone else is writing the "Piccadilly Jim" column. In the book, Jimmy wrote a bad review of a younger Ann's self-published book of romantic verse (in squishy leather). Any Wodehouse fan can tell you the attitude toward verse published in squishy leather. In the book, Jimmy wrote the review. In the movie, his successor is the real culprit, writing under the "Piccadilly Jim" brand name. But if Jimmy tells Ann who he's not just pretending to be Jimmy but he actually is Jimmy, she is less likely to marry him and more likely to kill him.And that's not the very worst. This is: Whoever wrote the review, Jimmy or his successor, the book and movie handle the situation in diametrically opposite ways. Wodehouse can be awfully, and hilariously, callous in his treatment of children and minor poets. But the movie treats the issue in more of a touchy-feely twenty-first century way that removes its fangs. Shame.Nevertheless, Jimmy's discovery of "his" reviews is very funny. And the movie's treatment of Ann is beautiful. Because of that review, Ann abandoned poetry and started writing crime novels noted for their violence. All written, no doubt, with "Piccadilly Jim" in mind. Though this treatment of Ann is hardly canonical, it's a lovely touch, and I like this neurotic and dangerous, hard-drinking, crime-writing Ann a whole lot better than Wodehouse's heroine of a century ago.Overall, it's a very good adaptation, only occasionally skating around Wodehouse's tightly-wound plot. It hardly presents any sort of real living conditions of the period, but ... frankly, neither did Wodehouse himself. If you can stomach the weird sets and styles, you're in for a lot of laughs. Unlike a lot of Wodehouse adaptations (for instance, I was never sold on Stephen Fry's Jeeves), this one is fast moving and FUNNY. And what is generally overlooked is that, like Wodehouse at his best, it's joyful.

Actors tend to place their trust in directors, even old stalwarts such as Mr Palmer, Ms Blethyn and Mr Wilkinson. Once the point has been missed by the producers/director, although in this case I don't think the point was ever sighted, the production must run its collision course with disaster, and not even such fine actors as were employed to give it life, could save Piccadilly Jim .PG Wodehouse was a successful writer who knew the value of the suspension of disbelief, and was able to deliver the theatrical creation of a world which, although highly unlikely, with a cleverly constructed set of plausibilities, would, and did, pass as the truth.Theatre has many natural enemies. Because it is not the truth, but the appearance of truth, theatre has many tricks and falsehoods in its infrastructure, and these are all susceptible to betrayal in drama, but in comedy they are especially vulnerable. The absolute death sentence on comedy, is to "mug" (pull faces) to attempt to be funny, or to overstate a quirk or characteristic.In Piccadilly Jim, the director breaks all the rules of good comedy by allowing, not only "mugging," and (keep it in) play funny work, but a whole swatch of clashes to occur. Modern dress, modern language, caricature rather than character, a mysterious failure at irregular intervals to use film language, and the erratic use of tempo, which often stifles its own dialogue.Many a great opera singer has come unstuck via the technicalities of a so called simple folk song. Perhaps this film came likewise unstuck, by its creators missing the hidden vortex within the supposed simplicity of the original story.

Warning, here there be spoilers.Wodehouse is notoriously difficult to film. The usual reason given for this is that Wodehouse is a literary writer and half the fun is his wordplay. But Wodehouse wrote Byzantine plots that do not translate well to a medium where simplicity is the key to understanding. Take impostors, for instance. Wodehouse loved what we today would call Identity Theft. He had characters staying in other people's houses under false identities all the time. The plot of "Picadilly Jim" is so involved and convoluted one character is staying in another person's home disguised as himself, and he begs a man who knows him not to reveal his true identity.On top of all this, Wodehouse's fans know his books too well for short-cut liberties to be taken blithely. When one films Wodehouse, one takes one's life in one's hands, as in an aerialist act performed without a net.This production started well by choosing a little-known Wodehouse novel, written before his "Golden Age" classics. The Jeeves and Blandings Castle sagas were only just poking their little heads out of their shells when PICADILLY JIM (the novel) was written.It's a little known book, and not a very important one in the Wodehouse oeuvre. And they give it to you fast and slick. Like the "Airplane" movies, if you don't laugh at one thing, they keep throwing Wodehouse at you until they tickle your funny bone somewhere.For Wodehouse purists, the adaptation sticks close to the books. Where the script deviates from Wodehouse writ, most of it is justifiable and a lot of new material is funny. And why not? It was scripted by Julian Fellowes, who, as an actor, played many a character that might have tumbled right out of Wodehouse.Sam Rockwell ("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "Midsummer Night's Dream"), tackling the part of the eponymous Jim, is one of those actors who seem born to play Wodehouse at some point. I'm glad he's playing a minor Wodehouse star.The rest of the cast is fine, with Tom Wilkinson, another Wodehouse natural, as a standout. Geoffrey Palmer has a good turn as a Wodehouse butler. Frances O'Connor is a trifle too neurotic for a Wodehouse female (the younger Wodehouse women are usually more together than the men, though they become unhinged with age). Her neurosis is firmly grounded in the book; the script flowered out the character flaw out to make her role more interesting. And it makes a darn good scene when Jim finally discovers what's driving this wacky chick.What is most criticized about this production is its clash of '30s and modern style. And sometimes, not even modern. It's more like Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL than anything human.Yet the source novel itself is a good example of why this is not a bad policy. PICADILLY JIM came out in 1918. What was going on in 1918? Show of hands. That's right, World War One. Only a few years earlier, the steamship "Lusitania" was sunk by German U-boats. Yet in the book, there is no mention of the war that had been foremost on people's minds for years. Clubs and restaurants in London are populated by young men who are not shell-shocked or otherwise scarred from battle. They are the vapid but well-educated scions of the nobility who had been cannon fodder in the trenches for four years. Characters hop on steamships and go from New York to London and back to New York with no thought or mention of U-boats, mines, or other hazards to shipping.Therefore, nearly one hundred years after this novel was first written, it does not seem bound to its time. Oh, the idea of traveling to England by steamship may be passé, but readers are not bogged down by the time-specific angst that makes so many "lost generation" novelists unpalatable today. Apart from a few mentions (such as in the novel QUICK SERVICE) no World War One intrudes into Wodehouse. Later on, though Wodehouse was in a German interment camp, England does not endure World War Two and his characters experience neither shortages nor bombings.Nevertheless, though his characters seem stuck in their Edwardian pleasaunces, they do travel through time and keep up with certain new developments. Updating the book to the thirties made a lot of sense, but throwing in modern styles, while jolting in a Brazilian sort of way, also is not unWodehouse.Warning: some unWodehouse things do appear, so strap in and be ready for them.For an even more astute version of Wodehouse, see "Heavy Weather" with Peter O'Toole and Samuel West.

This film has no redeeming features whatsoever. I knew what I was in for when I saw that it was made in the Isle of Man. What is it about films made there over the past ten years or so? Why are they all so lousy? Think Blackball. Think The Dark. You look at all of the cast and crew and you think - Why did it end up so bad? Decent actors who look like they can't wait to get the money and sod off on the next ferry. The direction is woeful yet John McKay has done OK TV work. The editing is some of the worst I have seen, yet you look at David Freeman's track record and you go fair enough, he must know his stuff. The script is by Oscar winning toff Julian Fellows, surely he must know his Wodehouse back to front? It looks like a sure fire winner. I warn you, its all true...no wit, no style and no fun.