“Wicker” is a satiric sex farce that teeters by on a tightrope, never quite tumbling into hilarity but often swooning and even scoring bawdy laughs spun out of the ludicrous, fairytale situations and “Sex Habits of the Elizabethans” setting.
The tone in this adaptation of a fable is wry and raunchy but never quite side-splitting. The casting couldn’t be better, with Oscar winner Olivia Colman as a lovelorn, smelly Fishmonger who hires a basket-weaver (Peter Dinklage) to “weave me a husband.”
Who plays this hunky, ginger-haired (branched) “Wicker” man? Alexander Skarsgård, the king of oddball, often inhuman and freakish (“It!”) casting, of course.
But the giggles are few and a tad too far between, even if Colman & Co. do their Python-lite damnedest to deliver, at least on their side of the camera.
In an unnamed, color-blind-casting village from the tail-end of the Tudor era, The Fisherwoman (Colman) is subject to scorn in a community where her wares may be wanted but her smell keeps many at arm’s length.
We meet her on a day when the dullish young Bottle Washer (Gustav Lindh) is to marry a doctor’s daughter (Marli Siu) via a bizarre Church of England sanctioned “collar” (neck shackle) ceremony that underscores wives as “property,” as “man and woman become man and his wife.”
Our Fishmonger is half-amused, but when the basket weaver’s woven, trick eggs are handed out to the village maidens by the bridge, she gets the one with the “prize” inside. Much merriment is made over her being “the next to wear the matrimonial collar.”
So she spends her savings on hiring that weaver to make her a spouse. He turns out to be not just tall, woody and handsome, but inadvertently soulful in how he talks to his new, break-the-bed lusty bride.
“You’re the reason I live and breathe,” he says, which is quite literally true. “Without you I would never have seen the sun set on the ocean.” Just as true.
But all that romantic talk, and the fact that he’s handy around the house — mending the roof, fish traps and the bed that their love-making breaks most every night — unsettles the unsatisfied wives and shows up and annoys the assorted “simple creatures” (louts) they’re married to.
That spells trouble, the basket-weaver senses, in this “village of blind-eyed ground moles.”
Elizabeth Debicki of “The Great Gatsby” and “Tenet” is queen bee among the wives, the doctor’s (Richard E. Grant) daughter and tailor’s (Nabhaan Rizwan) wife. She sews dissent and has no trouble stirring up gossip.
The menfolk resent having to undertake all this “talking” with their wives.
“I’m an Innkeeper,” Kiell Smith-Bynoe bellows, “not a minstrel!”
And that gossip tears at the insecure Fishmonger wife and her relationship with her guileless, grateful and kind husband.
Things kind of go wrong in the way some performances are pitched, with our Tailor’s Wife having many of her sharp edges rubbed off. Other wives bitch and moan but have few too scenes or lines to make much of an impression.
And the men, from those named for their professions — Baker, Butcher, et al — to “The Drunk” — are drawn dully and lack any edge to their performances as well.
Limiting the conflict to the new couple narrows the scope of the mayhem that abruptly erupts in the third act.
And writers-directors Alex Huston Fisher and Eleanor Wilson can’t wring laughs out of players who aren’t famously funny. Colman, Grant and Dinklage deliver. Skarsgård works. Nobody else is up to their level.
The sex jokes, about “wood” and “clams” and such, with matrimonial rituals that include the groom wearing a codpiece, blindfolded, as a goat eats a symbolic carrot out of his crotch, lack the Python absurdity they were meant to have.
It’s kind of fun, and timeless in its message. But lacking the edge and anarchy this sort of sex-based satire demands renders “Wicker” as instantly forgettable as its title and about as durable as that which its title character is woven from.
Rating: R, sexual content, nudity, profanity and bodily function gags
Cast: Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, Elizabeth Debicki, Marli Siu, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Emily Lloyd-Saini, Phil Daniels, Nabhaan Rizwan, Richard E. Grant and Peter Dinklage.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Huston Fisher and Eleanor Wilson, based on a fable by Ursula Wills. A Black Bear/Topic Studios release.
Running time: 1:45
