Toronto doesn’t half like its biopics. The festival last September had Mandela and Rush and Jimi Hendrix. It had films based on the memoirs of brave men like Eric Lomax and Solomon Northup. And it had the tale of the opera fan who won Britain’s Got Talent in 2007.
“The incredible true story of Paul Potts,” is what the posters promise, and that’s pretty much on song. It is incredible, partly for those bits that are true, sometimes for those that aren’t.
James Corden plays Paul, an apparently only child (actually there are three siblings) born and bred in Port Talbot (actually, Bristol — he moved to Port Talbot later) with mum Julie Walters and his dad, a metal worker (bus driver), in whose shoes he was urged to follow. The film shows how Paul didn’t sing much, or have many friends, and slaved his way up through the ranks of employment at Carphone Warehouse, under the management of boozy pal Mackenzie Crook (he also was a keen amateur singer, got a degree in humanities and became the youngest member of Bristol City Council in 1996, where he served for seven years). Other setbacks have the dial turned up to 11 in terms of their severity.
The movie is strongest when it strips away the facts and focuses on the emotional notes. His courtship of wife Julie-Ann, who he met in a chatroom, is beautifully judged by Corden and Alexandra Roach, and the tough-love of his father (Colm Meany) has a predictable arc but bowls along line-by-line. “Couldn’t you just eat him up?” says Walters, ever-indulgent. “You’d need a couple of sittings,” snaps back dad.
A sojourn in Italy, with Paul scraping savings to study in Venice, is less convincing, in particular his relations with a lush soprano. Again, it only rings true once it returns to earth: Pavarotti, for whom Paul must sing, is, says Julie-Ann, “nothing but a binge eater with a comb-over”.
Director David Frankl had his biggest hit with The Devil Wears Prada, and he’s an unlikely but cute match here, big on the insults, keen on the catharsis of flooring a bully. He holds our hero back from TV for as long as possible, which given the difficulty generating tension, feels a good call.
Corden plays Paul as a baby-faced sweetie, a naive with a dream, who gets lucky, most of all in love. His performance isn’t quite the barnstormer early buzz had suggested, but it’s a high-profile, entirely amiable turn full of heart.
Corden, Roach, Frankl and producer Harvey Weinstein appeared on stage at the film’s premiere in Toronto, along with the real-life Potts (who gave the audience a tune). Then, said Weinstein, the woman you’ve all been waiting for … and Taylor Swift (who does a song on the soundtrack) tottered in. The screams split ear-drums already tested by the arias. And I’d been hoping Julie Walters was just really big in Canada.
