By Theresa Rodewald.
Not every film has to reinvent the formula and for some viewers, Mr. Malcom’s List, with its delightful performances, will be the perfect film for a rainy day or a cozy movie night with friends. Those viewers looking for a more daring approach to the period drama narrative, however, are left wanting.”
Mr. Malcom (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) is very serious, very wealthy and very full of himself. He is also very single and has decided to find the perfect woman for himself; someone special who meets his standards, and who is worthy of his fortune and his love. Mr. Malcom is determined to marry for love but he also thinks that love can be divided into neat little numbers that add up to the sum of perfect matrimonial bliss.
He compiles a list with ten requirements that his potential match has to meet – including such charming attributes as being “amiable and even-tempered”, having musical talent and possessing in-depth knowledge of politics. With this list, Mr. Malcom goes around London high society dating woman after woman and being continually disappointed. He begins to doubt that there is someone out there for him but it never occurs to him to question his list.
Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton) accompanies Mr. Malcom to the opera, fails to discuss the government’s policy on grain prices and is immediately and very publicly dumped. Humiliated and infuriated, she sets her sights on revenge. Julia enlists her not-so-wealthy but modest and beautiful friend, Selina Dalton (Freida Pinto) to execute her plan. The idea is to train Selina to meet every one of Mr. Malcom’s requirements, making him fall in love with her and then dumping him just as spectacularly as he had dumped Julia. Everything goes according to plan until Selina does the inevitable and falls in love with Mr. Malcolm.
Mr. Malcom’s List is a fluffy, silly Regency drama by first-time feature film director and producer Emma Holly Jones, based on the screenplay by Suzanne Allain who adapted her own novel by the same name. The film is less concerned with Regency etiquette or society than it uses the setting of Regency-era London to tell a classic, Jane Austen-inspired romcom. There are no plot twists or daring changes to the formula and for most of the film, there don’t have to be. From the moment Selina meets Mr. Malcom, we know their love is bound to blossom, the pleasure lies in watching them figure this out as well.
A film like this hinges on the actors’ charisma and chemistry and on this front, Mr. Malcom’s List does not disappoint. Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù and Freida Pinto are beautiful, inherently watchable and make a great Regency couple. Zawe Ashton, Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Ashley Park put the comedy in romcom and look just as lovely in period costumes as the two leads. The casting by Tamara-Lee Notcutt is not only spot-on but also provides a much-needed update on a genre previously occupied by White people.
Due to its colourblind casting and period setting, Mr. Malcom’s List has been compared to the Netflix show Bridgerton (Chris Van Dusen, 2020 – ). And there are parallels between the two – namely the diverse cast and the blatant disregard for Regency etiquette. Yet, Mr. Malcom’s List adheres much more to the classic Pride and Prejudice formula. There is no sex in this film but plenty of pining and dramatic misunderstandings.
Period dramas are always fantasies, since they mirror the times they are made in much more than they reproduce the past. While Bridgerton is set in an alternative British past, where the Queen is played by Guyanese-British actor Golda Rosheuve, Mr. Malcom’s List occupies a place somewhere between alternative and regular history. Regency and Georgian Britain were less White than most movies lead us to believe, especially in big cities like London. While not many People of Colour were in positions of power, some were wealthy and well-connected in British high society. It is not just refreshing and vital for representation today to see People of Colour in period dramas and leading romantic roles but also a relatively accurate reflection of British history.
Yet, this smart and well-executed spin on the formula also highlights those genre tropes that Mr. Malcom’s List adopts without scrutiny. Marriage is still presented as the pinnacle of love and intimacy. The heterosexual happy ending/proposal seems almost inevitable, even if the film could have leaned into its storyline about female friendship, or the affectionate parody of Regency-era dramas it occasionally delivers.
The novels of Jane Austen that this film draws so heavily on are witty social satires as much (or much more) than romantic love stories. Austen’s female characters are allowed to be flawed, to read novels and to have a mind of their own. They have agency and strive for something akin to equality, even if it is not economic but intellectual. In the end, these characters are rewarded with marriage but marriage is not necessarily the point of the story. Mr. Malcom’s List unfortunately reinforces an often-idealised version of Austen’s novels – the film takes the text and loses the subtext.
Not every film has to reinvent the formula and for some viewers, Mr. Malcom’s List, with its delightful performances, will be the perfect film for a rainy day or a cozy movie night with friends. Those viewers looking for a more daring approach to the period drama narrative, however, are left wanting. Still, the film does a lot with a relatively small budget and overhauls the outdated Whiteness of many period dramas. It is a first step into a new direction that will hopefully lead to more movies brave enough to topple the narrative dominance of heterosexuality/marriage in Regency dramas.
Theresa Rodewald, MA, studied Cinema Studies at Stockholm University in Sweden and Cultural Studies in Germany and Ireland. She writes for a number of independent film magazines, including L-MAG and Berliner Filmfestivals, and has written about critiques of capitalism in current gangster films, images of masculinity in Scarface (1932) and the representation of queer women in mainstream cinema. She is a contributor to David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, December 2021).