Puzzling

Caught the last hour or so of that rare beast, an intelligent movie, the other night, and am now looking to see if they'll show it again. The animal in question was Longford with Jim Broadbent as our eponymous hero. Except he wasn't a hero in any simple sense, though deeply heroic in the ways that count. An English audience would immediately recognise the name, but not, as I have discovered through two conversations since, a Singaporean viewer, even the most cultivated.

In brief, he was a lord, of some fame/notoriety in the British media and world of politics generally for campaigning against pornography at a time when permissiveness was beginning to take off (more than in the simple sense of disrobing) and then supporting the cause of the jailed child killer Myra Hindley, in regard to attempting to get her parole as well as visiting her in prison. (Profoundly Christian in his beliefs he visited quite a number of other prisoners, but it was the deeply unpopular Hindley that brought the world down on his head.)

Was he right to believe she had reformed, that she deserved parole? The movie intelligently did not take sides on these impossible questions but rather made it its business to bring these issues powerfully to life in terms of their importance to all those caught up in the nightmare. I suppose I was drawn to the film partly because I grew up in the shadow of the murders, being almost exactly contemporary with the younger children involved. One was taken by Hindley, and her accomplice Brady, from Ashton market, a delightful place my wife and I love to visit when we go back to the UK. I remember the missing poster for another of the children sitting forlornly for what seemed an age in one of the windows of Denton Police Station. Now I know it couldn't have been up for all that long. Mum remembers a woman who worked opposite her saying that something was going on at her neighbour, Myra Hindley's house, on the morning of the big arrest.

The last meeting of Hindley and Longford in the film, at a point when Longford had long since been aware that Hindley had manipulated him for her own ends, quietly seemed to suggest something of a confrontation between good and evil, in the gentlest possible way. The lack of sensationalism about the whole thing was deeply impressive. Normally I'd be distrustful of a film dealing with such raw events. I'm not at all sure it's wise to put appalling murderers at the centre of our attention. But then this film didn't. It put a good, if deeply flawed, man there.

Finally there are never real answers. Just better questions.