Agatha (1979)

Distraught that her husband (Timothy Dalton) has asked her for a divorce, renowned author Agatha Christie (Vanessa Redgrave) takes off from her home in the dead of night without telling anyone where she is going. She doesn’t get so far before a car accident puts her afoot and has the police trying to track her down. She, meantime, takes up residence under a pseudonym in an hotel where it looks like she is researching for a future novel that might use electricity and water as tools of the trade! Meantime, her husband is proving to be a bit of a pain for the police (Timothy West) who are trying to establish if she is even still alive. American journalist “Stanton” (Dustin Hoffman) was supposed to have been given an interview with Mrs. Christie and irked that that is now in a abeyance determines to try to piece together the clues himself and see if he can’t track her down. He’s quite persuasive and charming and so it would seem to only be a matter of time before she is discovered. What will he find, though, and will she want anything to do with him if he is successful? It’s all a rather sterile affair this, and Redgrave’s usually passive style of acting does little to enliven the pedestrian pace of this lacklustre affair. Hoffman, likewise, seems to be merely going through the motions and though the entire thing has seen some considerable effort from the production designers and the costumiers the story just never really ignites. It’s obviously all speculative about what did really happen when she absconded, but surely Michael Apted and Kathleen Tynan could have been a little more imaginative and relied less on the aesthetic of the thing. It’s disappointing, sadly.