Allelujah

Heidi Thomas’s screenplay, cannily expanding a little on Bennett’s glisteningly witty original script, shows its hand with tactical finesse.

While Thomas and Eyre slip occasionally into feel-good vibes, they ultimately leave intact his narrative’s essential anger about the bureaucratic threat to community health care.

There’s nothing wrong with some silver screen sorrow, but not when it amounts to indecisive mush.

It didactically calls out governmental hypocrisy while exposing corrupt elements and inefficiencies within the precious institution itself. It hedges its bets politically between nostalgic keening for a kinder, fairer Britain of old and advocating for a top-down socialist makeover. It wavers tonally between cozy comedy and head-on polemic.

The aims are laudable, but the execution is as baggy as a discarded pair of support tights.

Eyre’s all-star cast may shine in Allelujah, but even Dame Judi Dench can’t save a film whose third act so spectacularly nosedives into “Batshit-Craziest Story Choices Ever Put On Film Hall Of Fame” territory.

This take on Alan Bennett’s pre-pandemic play, a love letter to the NHS set on a geriatric ward in Wakefield’s beloved-but-threatened Bethlehem Hospital (‘The Beth’), ticks along amiably enough for an hour or so. Then, like a hand grenade in a tombola, a harrowing third-act twist detonates beneath it and narrative and tonal destruction ensues.