'My Policeman' Showcases a Three-Way Love Story with No Happy Ending
My Policeman is a movie you really want to like, although its strange and inconclusive ending may leave you confused. It has a great cast, is directed by Michael Grandage, is based on the book by Bethan Roberts, and with a screenplay by Roy Nyswaner (whose credits include Philadelphia). It’s a fictionalized drama loosely based on real-life English author E.M. Forster, whose A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India are all considered early 20th-century classics and who had a life-long affair with a married policeman (albeit in the early 1900s rather than post-War England).
Like Forster's arrangement, this story begins as a love affair between two LGBTQ+ men in the 1950s, which is told in flashbacks from the 1990s. The policeman of the title, Tom (Linus Roache/Harry Styles as the younger version in the 1950s), encounters his former lover Patrick (Rupert Everett/David Dawson as the younger version) some forty years later. Tom is still married to the third wheel in that relationship, Marion (Gina McKee/Emma Corrin as the younger version). It’s not a happy marriage, particularly now as Marion has decided they are to house Patrick following a stroke. Tom and Patrick have been estranged for years, and Tom doesn’t want to see him.
