The title might be an unwieldy mouthful of words, but the rest of this charming, picturesque drama is not nearly so challenging. It’s part mystery, part love-triangle romance, unfolding with the gentility of an early-Sunday-evening BBC show. It takes place in a world where awful things happen, but our eye is always tastefully averted to prettier things. It’s escapist in several senses.
Doing most of the escaping is writer Juliet Ashton (Lily James). It’s 1946, the war is over and Juliet seems to have a lovely life. Her books have made her rich, although she has no real pride in them and publishes under a male pseudonym. She has a glamorous boyfriend (Glen Powell), although their connection doesn’t seem to go deeper than having a smashing time at parties. She is looking for her perfect home, but every dream is haunted by the death of her parents when her old home was bombed. Juliet isn’t unhappy, but she’s restless. When she receives a letter from a member of the titular book club, Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman), his story piques her interest enough that she sets off for Guernsey to find out more.
If the story plays out without the slightest surprise —the second you see that Dawsey is extremely handsome you know exactly where this is going — it doesn’t make it any less pleasant a watch. At its heart is a mystery, told in flashback, about what happened to one of the book club’s members (Jessica Brown Findlay), but it never feels like the driving force, more a sub-plot in its own movie. Juliet’s digging to uncover the truth doesn’t take much effort. She just asks the various members of the group and they give up the information almost immediately. The final reveal of what happened to her is more of an interesting dinner party story than a breathtaking shock.
Mike Newell (Four Weddings And A Funeral; Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire) knows his way through a crowd of eccentric Brits and he has a delightful time with some here. Katherine Parkinson is sweetly airy-fairy as a generally sozzled local gin-maker, Tom Courtenay is a picture-book granddad, Penelope Wilton puts everyone in order, and Matthew Goode has a high old time as Juliet’s jaunty agent, who appears to have just the one client. It’s all just thoroughly bloody jolly. Even the Nazis do little to darken the mood, all their most horrible deeds kept far off camera and discussed in hushed tones. This could not be more British a movie: nostalgic, thoroughly well acted, abundantly leafy and told in such a gentle way as to seem almost embarrassed about imposing.