Toronto film festival: Sally Hawkins is amiable enough the amateur historian who locates the long-dead monarch – but the uneven script digs its own grave
This peculiar, tonally uncertain, quirky-solemn-sentimental movie is based on the true story of Philippa Langley, likably played here by Sally Hawkins, the amateur British history enthusiast who in 2012 became globally famous for discovering the remains of Richard III beneath a Leicester car park.
By her own account, Langley was a member of the Richard III Society, which campaigns to rescue the Plantagenet king’s reputation from Shakespeare’s Tudor-era slanders. With passionate dedication, indefatigable research and some inspired detective work and intuition (the movie gets the “hunch” gag out of the way quickly), Langley was the driving force behind the archaeological dig that found the skeleton. But to get things done, she had to battle the academic establishment’s pomposity, complacency and sexism.
