Six years after his last venture into feature-film directing with Love Actually, the reigning Britcom king Richard Curtis returns with another typically sweet but insubstantial ensemble piece. Set in 1966, The Boat That Rocked stars Tom Sturridge as an innocent young pup sent by his bohemian mother to learn some valuable life lessons aboard Radio Rock, a pirate radio vessel moored in the English Channel.
The station's dandyish owner, played with typically louche charm by Bill Nighy, lives on board with a dysfunctional family of disc jockeys including Philip Seymour Hoffman's loudmouth American export, Chris O'Dowd's wholesome Irish romantic and Nick Frost's British prankster. Later, a celebrity DJ played by Rhys Ifans joins this motley gang of music-loving outlaws. Life at Radio Rock is painted as one long party punctuated by visits from young women and a jaunty soundtrack of 1960s pop classics, from the Rolling Stones to the Beach Boys to Leonard Cohen. But it can't last, of course. Back in London, Kenneth Branagh's fun-hating government minister is plotting to shut down the station, condemning it as a "sewer of dirty and irresponsible commercialism".
Curtis has long nurtured plans to make a film about the golden age of pirate radio, and it is certainly a fertile subject. Even at the height of the Swinging Sixties, Britain's state-controlled BBC networks broadcast just a few hours of pop music a week. As a consequence, wily entrepreneurs exploited growing public demand by setting up unlicensed stations in rusty fishing ships and disused wartime sea forts, most located in international waters just outside UK jurisdiction. Radio Rock is closely modelled on one of the era's most famous real-life pirate stations, Radio Caroline.
The UK government responded with the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act of August 1967, outlawing pirate broadcasters on flimsy pretexts, including the potential risks they allegedly represented to shipping and emergency services. Just weeks later, the BBC purposely killed off the market for illegal stations by launching its own official pop network, Radio 1, largely staffed by former pirate DJs. And thus, in effect, both sides won.
The film presses plenty of familiar buttons for Curtis fans. Nighy, Ifans and Thompson all previously worked with the writer-director on Notting Hill and Love Actually. Like Andie MacDowell and Julia Roberts before him, Hoffman is the obligatory token Hollywood star, acting everyone else off the screen. And Sturridge arguably steps into Hugh Grant's shoes as the shy, posh young hero. Alas, the film also amplifies many of the classic Curtis flaws that made Love Actually such a lukewarm experience. The episodic plot is painfully slight, built on laboured jokes and contrivances that would barely keep a cheap TV sitcom afloat. The director tries to plug these gaping holes with zany musical montages, most of them uncomfortably akin to Austin Powers-style retro spoofs.
Worse still, the cluttered cast of characters are all thinly drawn, with most reduced to a single cartoonish quality. The heroes are unanimously loveable, romantic clowns. The villains are pantomime-stuffed shirts, pompous and small-minded but essentially benign. Nobody gets hurt. Everybody gets rewarded. Mild, temporary disappointment is about as bad as life gets in Curtisworld. Sweet, shallow optimism may be a useful stance for breezing through life, but it does not make for great cinema. A recent profile in Britain's Observer newspaper depicted Curtis as the unofficial in-house film director for Tony Blair's New Labour government. Like Blair's Britain, the article claimed, Curtisworld is a semi-mythical kingdom where sunny sound bites mask a squeamish disregard for real problems. Stretching this theory to snapping point, the writer concluded by interpreting The Boat That Rocked as an epitaph for post-Blair Britain, a ship of fools sunk by its own idealism.
Fanciful, perhaps, but the political context behind the film is genuinely fascinating. This fabled battle to rule Britannia's airwaves took place under Harold Wilson's modernising Labour government, an administration obsessed by mass communication and promoting British youth culture as a global brand - another uncanny parallel with the Blair regime. Alas, Curtis clearly found such real-life ironies and contradictions too messy to make a historically accurate film. Instead, he settles for an infantile, clichéd showdown between the stuffy forces of conservatism and the liberated young groovers of the Swinging Sixties. The Boat That Rocked features a fine cast, but sets them adrift in a waterlogged, rudderless vessel that ultimately sinks under the weight of its own sugar-coated smugness.