Wicker gets the difficult part of its premise out of the way by making the Fisherwoman’s decision sound eminently practical. She makes her living on the edge of a village where people are happy to have fish and would prefer to keep the person who catches them at a distance. The local basketmaker knows a trade she has a use for. She commissions a husband. Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer are careful to give this decision a history of ordinary slights. The pleasure of the fairy tale begins with a woman whose neighbors have had ample opportunity to make conventional company seem desirable.
Olivia Colman can be very funny as someone whose tolerance for the opinion of a room has been worn out through use. She can also register the small injury of being reminded that a room has an opinion about her at all. The performance makes those capacities look as though they belong to the same working person. Her impatience has a reason beyond generating a quotable line, and the story’s tenderness has more room because the character is allowed to be an imperfect neighbor. It would be harder to believe the village’s hostility if every joke required her to be nicer than the people making it.
Peter Dinklage gives the Basket Weaver a welcome directness. The commission requires someone to consider material, construction and the customer’s wishes before the story can get around to asking how strange those wishes are. Treating the request as a job also gives the Fisherwoman a position she rarely has in the village. She is a person who can specify something she wants and reasonably expect the person across from her to make an effort to understand. The comedy takes a different shape when craft gives an unconventional desire somewhere to go.
Alexander Skarsgård’s Wicker Husband has a job to do before he can plausibly be funny or desirable. He has to look as though he could inhabit the body the basketmaker has produced. The wicker is an expressive restriction. It makes a shift in posture feel like something with a cost and keeps the audience aware of the material at the point when it might otherwise become an ornament. The romance benefits because Colman can direct attention toward the person making a movement instead of making her partner’s appearance a running demand for an explanation.
The villagers’ reaction is a shrewd source of comedy. An unconventional couple can be scandalous to people who feel quite secure in their own arrangements, right up to the moment when it makes those arrangements look negotiable. There is a kind of institutional jealousy at work here alongside the personal variety. The film catches the ugly pleasure of people who believe the Fisherwoman has acquired something they are entitled to regulate. Some of the village portraits are broad enough to make it easy to feel above their curiosity. There is more bite when their curiosity is recognizably close to our own.
The rough surfaces carry a practical advantage for the film. Wicker has a sound and a resistance that a smoother costume would have trouble suggesting. An embrace between these two can involve a degree of attention to each other’s physical comfort that a more conventional screen couple is rarely asked to supply. That gives the tenderness a very particular shape. It also complicates the idea that the Fisherwoman has simply commissioned a perfect fit. There is a person there to learn how to touch, with a new set of difficulties and pleasures that no village marriage would have prepared her for.
The co-directors’ willingness to leave rough edges on the world pays off in both the bawdiness and the intimacy. It leaves room for a body to be an object of desire without first fitting itself to a familiar image. The tale has more trouble sustaining the specificity of the couple once their situation becomes a public argument. The town needs to enter the frame to give the romance stakes. More time with the daily work of living together would have made the argument that follows still harder to settle.
