Topsy-Turvy

(USA)

Yes, this Mike Leigh film is the story of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado, but you don't have to be a G&S fan to enjoy it. In fact, if you have any cherished notions about the pair, or about the elegant splendor of the Victorian Era, this is not the Merchant Ivory picturebox for you. Leigh's warts-and-all portraiture reveals William S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) to have been a pair of thoroughly neurotic, frustrated, combative men who nonetheless forged a long and successful partnership based on charisma and talent. What's more, this is that rare backstage drama that really illustrates from start to finish the work behind putting on a show, work arduous and painstaking enough to make acting look like an honorable profession and the actors look like working-class heroes. The artists strive for perfection and order in their creation but at the end of the evening are left with only the randomness and dissatisfactions of real life. Yet their song lingers, in Topsy-Turvy's haunting final scene, a testament to the performers' Sisyphean, heroic labor.