This week it was announced that the forthcoming Peaky Blinders film has just got a bit starrier. Yesterday, none other than Barry Keoghan joined the production, in a role that has yet to be revealed.
Keoghan’s presence adds another layer of prestige to the movie – he was nominated for an Oscar last year – and joins a cast led by newly minted best actor winner Cillian Murphy. Despite this, it still feels as if the Peaky Blinders movie has its work cut out. This is because, as a film based on a television show, it is swimming against the tide.
Had Peaky Blinders been a film that was going to become a TV show, it would be a different story. Shows based on films are undoubtedly the hot new thing. Come the end of the year, you will struggle to find a better show than Amazon Prime’s Mr & Mrs Smith; a series that took a gleefully shallow piece of film-making and transformed it into a long, warm, deep exploration of what marriage is. It was incredible, as was this year’s instalment of Fargo, Noah Hawley’s experiment to twist and subvert the Coen brothers’ source material as hard as possible while still retaining its basic form.
Shows like this work because they have space to fully interrogate a premise. In short, they did what Peaky Blinders the TV show did. Over 36 hours of television, it traced an arc through a decade and a half of postwar Birmingham, telling a story as ambitious as Our Friends in the North while simultaneously hitting the requisite amount of genre beats. To think that it can be topped by a two-hour movie, even one that comes with a bigger budget, seems wildly hubristic.
Also, did you see the Luther movie? It was a mess. Hemmed in by a feature-length running time, it didn’t know what to do with itself and ended up chasing its tail until it keeled over, exhausted. Similarly, the Downton Abbey films are so pointless that they increasingly feel like a ruse to persuade your nana to spend a couple of hours somewhere warm. Why would Peaky Blinders want to emulate that?
The TV-to-movie trap can seduce the best of them. Taken in isolation, Vince Gilligan’s El Camino is a fine little film, if a bit structurally lopsided. But it is destined to stand for ever in the shadow of Breaking Bad, a generational accomplishment that could not have existed in any other medium.
Television has always had a weakness for the silver screen. Anyone who suffered the bad old days of On the Buses spin-off Holiday on the Buses will recognise the familiar sinking feeling of a long-running show trying to compress itself into a new form. Character moments are sacrificed to plot. The rhythms are off. The extra money ends up detracting from the charm of the original. This is more a throwback to when televisions were small and people went to the cinema, but it was also often weird to see the characters up on a big screen.
This is something, at least, that Peaky Blinders won’t have to contend with. It is a show with a movie-star lead, who will be surrounded by other movie stars. But my theory is this: if the Peaky Blinders movie is really to be a success and eclipse everything that the television show accomplished, it should be abandoned for a quarter of a century.
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That’s what happened when Harrison Ford starred in The Fugitive. That began as a TV show in the 1960s, but leaving it alone for a few decades gave audiences space to put the original to one side and accept it in its new form. And it worked – the movie version was nominated for a bunch of Oscars and ended up as the third-biggest movie of 1993 in world box office ratings. The same goes for The Untouchables, which gave its source material (a 1950s TV show) time to rot before it came back hard with Sean Connery and Robert De Niro.
Then, of course, there is Mission: Impossible. Tom Cruise needed to let the memory of the original 1960s show fade before he could reimagine it as the full-tilt action extravaganza that it is. And it’s a good job he did, because few things in the world are as good as a Mission: Impossible film.
So that’s what needs to happen with Peaky Blinders. Let’s put this film plan on hold, wait 30 years, and then set it in space and cast Timothée Chalamet as a version of Tommy Shelby who is a base-jumping cowboy with a laser gun. This, and only this, is what the people really want to see.