1. This film earns most of its score just from the performance of Maggie Smith. She is wonderfully batty, half-deranged and as she totters around with her canes and rumbles along in whatever vehicle she's in at the moment, you cannot take your eyes off her. In my opinion, she's in the top three performances by a lead actress last year.
2. I found Nicholas Hynter/Alan Bennett's decision to have two Alan Bennett characters quite endearing but at other times rather annoying. It closed out the film quite nicely but throughout I don't feel it really added a whole lot.
3. I don't know whether to credit the screenplay or Dame Maggie Smith's delivery, but everything she says is wonderful, especially when jabbering about the Virgin Mary or driving ambulances.
4. Jim Broadbent's small role is an nasty slimy and impressive play against Horace Slughorn, but his character was never fully realised.
5. "Mary, as you call her, is a bigoted, blinkered, cantankerous, devious, unforgiving, self- serving, rank, rude, car-mad cow, which is to say nothing of her flying feces and her ability to extrude from her withered buttocks turds of such force, that they land a yard from the back of the van and their presumed point of exit." This line is so wonderfully written and funny that I lay back and laughed for about sixty seconds.
6. The "mystery" introduced at the start of the film is so obvious that they would have been better off just being open about it from the beginning.
7. The pace is slow at times. Not unbearable, but slow. In a 1hr 40 minute movie, it takes far too long for her to even get into Alan's driveway.
8. The bustle around the graveyard is likely the best part of Maggie Smith's performance, but it ended with a little too much spirituality and silliness for me.
9. I've seen people complain about the wasted cameos of James Corden and Dominic Cooper. What they likely don't realise is that they are just two of a much larger cast of one of Alan Bennett's plays who all cameo in the film. There wasn't room to flesh out all the cameos, it was just as a nice little nod to Bennett himself.
10. It takes too long to end. She's not Oskar Schindler, she doesn't need a live action tribute at the end.
2. I found Nicholas Hynter/Alan Bennett's decision to have two Alan Bennett characters quite endearing but at other times rather annoying. It closed out the film quite nicely but throughout I don't feel it really added a whole lot.
3. I don't know whether to credit the screenplay or Dame Maggie Smith's delivery, but everything she says is wonderful, especially when jabbering about the Virgin Mary or driving ambulances.
4. Jim Broadbent's small role is an nasty slimy and impressive play against Horace Slughorn, but his character was never fully realised.
5. "Mary, as you call her, is a bigoted, blinkered, cantankerous, devious, unforgiving, self- serving, rank, rude, car-mad cow, which is to say nothing of her flying feces and her ability to extrude from her withered buttocks turds of such force, that they land a yard from the back of the van and their presumed point of exit." This line is so wonderfully written and funny that I lay back and laughed for about sixty seconds.
6. The "mystery" introduced at the start of the film is so obvious that they would have been better off just being open about it from the beginning.
7. The pace is slow at times. Not unbearable, but slow. In a 1hr 40 minute movie, it takes far too long for her to even get into Alan's driveway.
8. The bustle around the graveyard is likely the best part of Maggie Smith's performance, but it ended with a little too much spirituality and silliness for me.
9. I've seen people complain about the wasted cameos of James Corden and Dominic Cooper. What they likely don't realise is that they are just two of a much larger cast of one of Alan Bennett's plays who all cameo in the film. There wasn't room to flesh out all the cameos, it was just as a nice little nod to Bennett himself.
10. It takes too long to end. She's not Oskar Schindler, she doesn't need a live action tribute at the end.