The Lesson

Pablo Picasso famously said, "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." Or, as author J.M. Sinclair puts it, "Average writers attempt originality but the greats, great writers, steal."

So, it seems, do the painfully average, as shown in plagiarism noir The Lesson, a slow-motion thriller that aspires to elegance but quickly devolves into derivative mediocrity. At fault is the utterly predictable script by Alex MacKeith, who follows up his critically well-received theatrical debut, School Play, with a surprisingly mundane story of writerly sins.

It's all so by the numbers: a crumbling mansion in the English countryside, an award-winning author in a late-career lull, a femme fatale wife, their troubled son, and a talented young interloper who may as well have "patsy" monogrammed on his luggage. Liam Sommers (McCormack) has been hired by fading and erratic literary lion J.M. (an always-game Grant) to tutor his son, Bertie (McMillan) – all under the watchful and enigmatic eye of Sinclair's wife, Hélène (Delpy, channeling her best Jane Greer). Throw in the rest of the familiar ingredients: a drowned firstborn, an unfinished manuscript of questionable provenance, catty conversations about authorship and ownership, a locked door, a mysterious server (not to be confused with the furtive butler, Ellis, played by Letts), and the growing suspicion that the family wants more from Liam than a few lessons and a little light proofreading of J.M.'s comeback manuscript. You've probably written most of the major plot beats in your head already, and you likely have them right.

MacKeith's script aspires to some level of tricksy insight into the messy ways that words hit the page, but his observations are so prosaic that any freshman literary student would lambast their mundanity. So The Lesson has to depend on its noir sensibilities, which are unfortunately equally unengaging. It's not just that it's a less interesting interpretation of crime flick tropes, but that it's a pale shadow of not one but two Michael Caine films: genius 1972 mystery Sleuth and its 1982 queer mirror image Deathtrap. In the former, Caine played the Sommers part of the up-and-comer caught in the web of deceit around an aging writer; a decade later, he was reading the Sinclair lines. In both, he leaned into the gothic silliness of the whole endeavor, giving them a sweeping grandeur that he kept grounded through that inherent earthiness. By contrast, McCormack is too staid – and Liam's slowness in working out why he's really been lured to this remote estate doesn't bode well for his talents as a plotter. Meanwhile, J.M.'s writer's block is both a clumsy diagnosis that's never really explored and a lazy excuse for an instigating incident.

Maybe that's the joke, that even supposedly great writers can't help but fall into a rut of pale imitation. But MacKeith doesn't bring enough innovation to the recounting of this hoary old truism – old being the operative word, since The Lesson takes place in a bygone era when "literary megastar" had some meaning. Maybe some grasp of the dynamics of the modern publishing industry would have added some grit, making it more than it is: a formulaic and forgettable pulpy beach read.