Jason Watkins made Jefferies too camp
I was disappointed with the performance of Jason Watkins.
I compared his performance with the real Jefferies from news reports. Jason Watkins made Jefferies too camp.
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MovieChat Forums > The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies (2014) Discussion > Jason Watkins made Jefferies too camp
Watkins wouldn't have wanted to portray the real Christopher Jeffries. He was making a drama, not a documentary.
As long as the real guy isn't offended by his performance, I don't have a problem either. As a matter of fact, I think he did a good job: he portrayed a perfectly decent individual, who's a little bit of a square peg, a little bit haughty in manner but quite nice, sightly uncomfortable around people though generally well meaning ...... Quite a vivid character.
He's eccentric. The way Jefferies was portrayed seemed to come across as a bit snobby, or at least that could be interpreted by many people to be the case. Yet he seemed a kind and caring person who was a bit uncomfortable with social interaction but certainly not a hermit and shut off to the world. He came across as the person we wanted to be the murderer, an oddball, an elitist, someone we can point at at say "Look at him, he's strange, he's not one of us. You can just tell he did it." We like to have our monsters fit the bill. We want them to be ugly, different, and someone who is not like us. More often then not our monsters are not easily noticed, they do a more then admirable job at disguising themselves and convincing us they are one of us and they can be trusted. I think that's what really scares us, that it could be our neighbor, our spouse, our children who are monsters. Yes we like our monsters to be like the ones told in fairy tales or the ones we see in movies. That way we don't have to think about it and worry about whether we really know one another.
sharempurvis:
Yeah, that was a point made subtly in the film----that it's not always the weird eccentric dude automatically considered the suspect precisely because he was weird, that people should have just focused on----it was the nice, polite boy-next-door type you should also watch out for (which is what the real suspect turned out to be, ironically.) I don't think Watkins' performance came off as campy at all---in fact, that's what I liked about it---he could have easily ramped up the campiness level way over the top, but he didn't----you're always reminded that beneath all the eccentricities and somewhat snobby 'tude, there's a real human being with insecurities and issues just like any other human being, who actually likes being around other beings like himself. That was a nice, decent and refreshing approach to the character
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Loved this movie. It truly showed the injustice and triumph of what happens a lot in today's society! My sister even liked it, and she normally only watches horror movies.
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