Harry Styles isn’t a bad actor in My Policeman, just a bad talker

Somewhere in the middle of the disastrous, gossip-riddled publicity campaign for Olivia Wilde’s film Don’t Worry DarlingYou can find out more at http://www.amazon.com/?p=238. short clipA scene featuring Harry Styles, Florence Pugh and Rolling Stone was published. But the extensive profile and the eye-catching cover photography were largely overlooked amid the internet referendum over the clip, which prompted discussions about the quality of the 28-year-old pop star’s acting. He was mocked mercilessly by Film Twitter. His army of supporters rallied around him. That worked out well, as you can see.

Harry Styles is hardly the first singer — or athlete, or wrestler, or whatever — to ride his popularity into film acting, then get some tough notices. His star role and the drama on its set (he was supposedly in a relationship with Wilde, which allegedly led to a falling out between Wilde, Pugh) added more pressure, and the public became very interested in him. It seemed to be a major international issue. Harry Styles is able to act.

With the release of the queer drama, we can enjoy an additional round of this debate My policeman The film debuted in American cinemas on October 21st, and will be available on Amazon Prime Video starting Nov. 4. It’s very unusual Don’t Worry DarlingThe film is modest, sober, and a bit bleak. If Styles weren’t in it, it wouldn’t merit a second look. He is. My Policeman has been drawn into the maelstrom of Styles’ fame, and the film world’s huffy resistance to it.

The appeal of Harry Styles wearing sharp 1950s clothing in both movies is evident. My PolicemanHis talents are better displayed in this film. Styles portrays Tom, who is a Brighton police officer during the 1950s when homosexuality was illegal. The pair have a sexy relationship with Patrick Dawson, the museum curator. Through a framing device set in the 1990s, with the three characters played by older actors, and through a shift in time and perspective at the halfway point, the film coyly unspools Tom’s conflicted relationship with Patrick and with his own sexuality, and the sad denouement of this little love triangle.

This says a lot about you. My Policeman’s cautious sexual politics that even the film’s nominally more contemporary and enlightened frame reaches back to the ’90s. Screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) and director Michael Grandage (GeniusWorking from Bethan Roberts’ novel, the pair seem content to indulge in the nostalgia of the past with fine melancholy. This is stock-in-trade for a certain kind of prestige British production, the best example being Merchant-Ivory’s heartbreaking The Rest of the Day. My policemanFollow the guidelines carefully. It may go down well with the older matinee-screening crowd, although it’s hard to imagine Harry Styles’ Gen Z fanbase connecting with anything other than the decorous sex scenes.

Styles as the young Tom is charming, charming, awkward, but all of these qualities work. His amazing and swirling hairstyle is what the cameras love about Styles. He has a screen magnetism that goes beyond his good looks, too: There’s something very watchable and Very easy to read about him, an endearing openness and innocence without which Tom’s closeted denial, and the way he uses Marion, might come across as frosty or cynical. It’s a big part, with moments of emotional intensity, but Tom’s confusion and repression are always visible, which suits Styles well.

Jack is Don’t Worry Darling, the twists and turns of the script require Styles to make sense of his character’s hidden layers, multiple personae, and dark impulses. Styles’ ability to change his mind in a chameleonic fashion was beyond him. This left him with no choice but to leave the movie. As an actor, he’s likely to find more suitable expression in roles where his heart is permanently on his sleeve.

That doesn’t mean he’s bad at acting. His disarming inability to feel deeply can actually be an asset if used with care. Just look at his scenes in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. The 2017 film was Styles’ first acting gig, but though his part is small, he has to deliver some of the movie’s biggest emotional beats: furiously trying to eject a silent soldier from a sinking boat after realizing he might not be English, and cowering in shame from the hostile reception he expects Britain’s defeated forces to meet on their return home. In the first of these scenes, his naked desperation is frightening; in the second, it’s pitiful. In both cases, the audience is with him.

But Styles lacks one very important part of an actor’s skillset, which wasn’t that evident in DunkirkHowever, he is made painfully clear in the two films he has just released. He’s just not very good at speaking.

It’s not that he’s unclear or hard to comprehend. Actually, the exact opposite. It is quite the opposite. He speaks in a childlike, deliberate cadence where each syllable seems like it carries the same weight. For all of the world, he sounds like a twelve-year old reading aloud to class. He has an accent that is northwestern English. His roots are in Cheshire (south of Manchester), and his long-winded vowels add to his poor speech. It’s a clumsy way of speaking, and it leads to some unintentionally funny line readings — often at the worst possible moments, when he’s working hardest emotionally. In a crucial scene in My Policeman, he rounds on Marion, who is getting to the truth of his relationship with Patrick, and shouts, “You’ve got a dirty mind!” It somehow comes out petulant and camp, and it drew a big, derisive laugh from the audience in the screening I attended.

Warner Bros. Pictures

This may be what viewers are looking for in the new television series. Don’t Worry Darling clip struggled to understand what accent he was going for, when it’s just his natural accent. It is quite funny, however that the movie has to make a complicated in-universe explanation for Styles’ accent. No speech seems to sound entirely natural coming out of Styles’ mouth. It’s as if he’s learning to talk from first principles. Each line sounds almost like an a Line.

This might seem like a fatal flaw for an actor, but verbal cadence is a skill that can be taught far more easily than holding the camera’s gaze or the audience’s sympathy. Styles have the ability to combine both of these skills better than any other person in the industry. With work — and through collaborations with directors who can get him to relax and be himself, as Nolan clearly did — he could be a movie star yet.

Marvel Studios certainly hopes so. Eternals’ mid-credit scene revealed Styles’ casting as Eros, aka Starfox, Thanos’ carefree playboy brother. His garbled, leaden delivery of his few lines, and the dreadful American accent he employs for them, make Starfox’s inclusion in future MCU films seem like a liability. But before he opens his mouth — as he saunters into the frame with a wry half-smile and a glint in his eye — there’s a momentary blast of the irresistibly insouciant star power that he has on stage, but that none of his other, generally serious film roles to date has let him show. It would be easy for him to untie the knot on his tongue.