Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

“Wicked Little Letters”

Sony Pictures Classics

Directed by Thea Shrock

Starring Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Timothy Spall and Gemma Jones

Rated R

2 ½ Stars

It’s amusing to remember that there was once a time when writing something rude was considered to be the height of bad behavior, and perhaps even an illegal action.

Now it’s an everyday occurrence whenever you log on to the Internet, but back in the 1920s, a young mother was arrested on the suspicion of sending poison pen letters to one of her neighbors.

“Wicked Little Letters” is the gentile dramatization of the scandal that apparently shocked Great Britain in the days following World War I.

Olivia Colman plays a God-fearing spinster who begins receiving lewd and abusive letters in the mail. She and her father (Timothy Spall) immediately suspect the Irish immigrant who’s moved in next door (Jessie Buckley) because she’s rude, foul-mouthed and has even been known to go about while not wearing shoes on the Sabbath.

Despite a lack of any evidence, the local constabulary arrests the immigrant woman and charges her with libel. Fortunately, there is one officer (Anjana Vasan) who believes the woman might be innocent. None of her male superiors are willing to listen to the theories of a woman police officer, so she decides to investigate on her own.

You can probably guess what she will find, but it still makes for an amusing little adventure with some fun characters and a few chuckle-worthy moments.

“Wicked Little Letters” turns out to be a fun little piffle of a movie, but it never truly rises to anything more than just an amiable way to pass a few hours at the movie theater.

That’s a bit of a shame as the two actresses at the center of the drama are quite talented. Colman looks like she’s having a blast playing the spinster suffering through an unspeakable attack, all the while enjoying the notoriety she gets as the victim of this crime.

Buckly too appears to be having fun playing the rude-but-loving young mother. It’s a coarse-but-cuddly role where she is prone to barrages of profanity.

She even stops in the middle of a chase sequence to moon the police officers who are pursuing her. It’s played as mild rebellion rather the truly outrageous behavior.

These are two showy roles, but there’s not a whole lot of depth to the characters. Perhaps the producers thought that these acclaimed actresses would find deeper meaning in the story.

Alas, we get superficial portraits at best.

The story also comes across as only a slight tale. Granted, sensibilities have changed so much over the past century that contemporary audiences won’t be shocked at anything written in the letters. It makes for a quaint outrage, yet the story needs the scandal to be more serious in order to make us worry about what will happen to the poor woman being accused.

Instead, this reads like a whitewashed tale of yore where bigotry is given a pass in order to tell a strange-but-true little historical oddity.

It’s difficult to get very invested in a story like that, no matter who the leading ladies might be.

Ultimately, “Wicked Little Letters” is technically a well-made movie. It has just enough good will that it should please the Masterpiece theater/BBC-loving crowds. And to be fair, it is a critique of British society, but it’s so mild that it doesn’t come across as something truly serious. I’m left wondering what it might have been if

“Wicked Little Letters” was allowed to be genuinely wicked.

Movie reviews by Sean McBride, “The Movie Guy,” are published each week by Port Arthur Newsmedia. Sean welcomes your comments via email at sean@seanthemovieguy.com.