In roles previously played by Dirk Bogarde and Glenda Jackson, Hugh Bonneville and Keeley Hawes are now the writer Roald Dahl and his actress wife Patricia Neal. Both Bonneville and Hawes are very fine actors in their own right, if perhaps more famous on television than in the cinema and anyone who, in recent years, has seen "Bodyguard", "Line of Duty" or "It's a Sin" will know just what a chameleon Hawes can be and you think that even an Oscar-winning American actress might not be a stretch and that Dahl would be a walk in the park for Bonneville.
As befits a film about the author of children's books, John Hay's film "To Olivia" is as much about the children in the Dahl/Neal marriage as it is about the adults but despite decent work all round this never rises above a conventional Sunday night BBC or ITV drama, (and good as Hawes is, she's certainly not Neal). Quite frankly, this could be a movie about any middle-class couple living in any English village and finding they don't get along and you certainly won't learn anything about either of its central celebrities. Both Neal and Dahl had their fair share of tragedy, treated here as soap opera. As Geoffrey Fisher, one-time Archbishop of Canterbury, the wonderful Geoffrey Palmer has no trouble stealing the film but ultimately this is a film that is not worth stealing or indeed seeing.
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