My Policeman: Linear vs. Non-Linear Film Storytelling

By Claude Brickell

Throughout British/American film history, the standard storytelling format has been linear: the hero has a goal and an obstacle standing in the way of achieving that goal. And the story progresses in a linear format from its beginning to its end. Screenwriters occasionally employ a flashback to further elucidate what is occurring in the present by returning briefly to an earlier moment in the character’s past. But the story remains linear. The exception is a reverse format where the past is at the beginning and the story is told in reverse. Each segment of that, however, remains linear. Examples are Memento and the shocking French film Irreversible.

But, there is also the non-linear format which employs the past equally with the present as its standard and with the present and past jockeying back and forth between the two segments, which requires a highly skilled screenwriter like Ron Nyswaner who has adapted Bethan Roberts’ very popular My Policeman novel to the screen by the same title. Nyswaner first burst onto the screenwriting scene with his Oscar-winning screenplay Philadelphia, the film starring Tom Hanks in 1993. Nyswaner admits to being drawn to “tragic love stories.” In that sense, the regret-laced recollections in Robert’s novel My Policeman made for a perfect match of writer and subject. “To bring that to a big audience (with Amazon’s financing), and with Harry [Styles], Emma [Corrin], and all the rest of the beautiful cast, [was] a dream come true,” Nyswaner says.

My Policeman is a story set in 1950s Brighton, England about Tom Burgess, a rookie policeman, who encounters, by chance or maybe not, Patrick Hazelwood, a gay and introspective curator at the local art museum. After that, Tom’s life as a police officer drastically changes as it begins opening up his inner homosexual longings. This is, in no way, publically accepted and certainly not permissible for a police officer in that sexually repressive era. Driven to conform to public norms, however, Tom seeks a heterosexual marriage with friend Marion Taylor and eventually consummates it. The problem is, Tom is not willing to give up his relationships with either Patrick or Marion. He needs both. Fast forward to the present where we encounter, again, the three still entwined (told from Marion’s perspective), and after Patrick has been arrested and sent off to prison for homosexual crime and Tom has been forced to resign his position as a Brighton police officer, all in the past. To complicate things further, and because Marion is dealing with an inner guilt for having driven a wedge between a deeply committed male/male relationship, and after Patrick has suffered a serious stroke virtually paralyzing him, she decides to bring Patrick to live with her and Tom in the present. Tom, however, is staunchly opposed to this as he continues to see his relationship with Patrick ill-fated from the start and the cause of his professional downfall.

Michael Grandage’s highly-sensitive handling of My Policeman, and the poignantly-memorable character portraits by Harry Styles ( Dunkirk ), Emma Corrin ( The Crown ) and David Dawson (All The Old Knives) in the past, and Rupert Everett (The Name of the Rose), Linus Roache (The Apology) and Gina McKee (Notting Hill) in the present, have brought Roberts original story to a masterful film offering with Nyswaner’s brilliant script.

Nyswaner describes My Policeman as “a beautiful book” that’s heavy on introspection. It [was] his job, then, to translate these interior feelings to the screen. “They can’t say ‘I love you;’ they can’t say ‘I need you’ for many reasons.” Staying true to the depth of Roberts’ characters, while ensuring that the nuances of Tom, Marion and Patrick’s dynamic are conveyed to an audience, is vital to the success of his film adaptation. He believes the older and younger counterparts of the central trio, coupled with Michael Grandage’s sensitive directing, have more than risen to the task.

When Grandage first presented Roberts’ book to Nyswaner, it was in linear format. The author had dealt with the characters individually in the past then carried her story to the present forty years later. Nyswaner says the one challenge in adapting this dual narrative that brims with desire, longing and jealousy, was that so much of it is an internal reflection of restrictive circumstances. And he read the novel multiple times before putting it aside. “I let it just be in me and then come out in a way that was, I hoped, truthful to the book.” And he right away saw the importance of the past within the present as an integral whole in that the past never leaves us; it is always there. He then began to see the necessity of a volley between both. The story simply had to be told in a non-linear format. His adaptation of events therefore vacillates between the past and the present, often back and forth and sometimes within the past as well as the present. What has resulted is a narrative full of highly complex inner feelings presented for the viewer.

On Tom and Patrick: “What makes their love affair so beautiful and tragic is that it’s precious, and time is against them. Their love is fleeting, which makes them both want it so much more,” says Dawson who plays the younger Patrick.

On Marion: “One of the elements about getting… older is that it can be life-altering. Your perspectives are sharpened,” says Gina McKee who plays Marion, older.

My Policeman is a story of clandestine love that leads to stolen moments in public and private as the titular police officer embarks on a journey of intellectual and sexual self-discovery in 1950s Britain. It’s an artfully executed feature you won’t want to miss.

(*quotes from Amazon Studios)