‘The Lesson’ Review: In the Shadow of a Literary Master

“The Rose Tree” would have been an apt and clever title for the dueling-writers drama “The Lesson,” in which a neophyte scribe takes a job working for one of the lions of the profession on the latter’s lavish country estate. A prized plant on the sweeping grounds is the rhododendron (Greek for “rose tree”). Though dazzling, it emits toxins: The author’s son tells us that nothing can grow around it.

The human rose tree on the property is the famous author J.M. Sinclair, played by Richard E. Grant in another forceful if somewhat campy performance. Mr. Grant scored a richly deserved Oscar nomination as a partner in a forgery scheme in 2018’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” but has in general been criminally underused in the movies, often consigned to walk-on parts. His acidic presence makes nearly everything he’s in worth watching. Sinclair’s imperiousness is the reason why, though he used to have two sons, he now has only one. Nothing grows in his presence.

Sinclair’s surviving son, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), is cramming for the University of Oxford entrance exam in English literature, and to give him a little help Sinclair’s wife, Hélène (Julie Delpy), brings in a live-in tutor and budding novelist, Liam Sommers ( Daryl McCormack ), who received top grades in the same subject at the same university. As Sinclair didn’t attend university, and Hélène was schooled in France and New York, she reasons that their son stands a better chance if coached by someone well versed in the British system. Yet Liam’s Irish accent immediately sets him apart, and some gentle quizzing reveals that he is unaccustomed to upper-class mores. Asked his opinion of Rachmaninoff, he demurs. “I’m not familiar,” he says meekly.

Could there be some hidden motive behind Liam’s presence? Certainly, and figuring that out is one of the small pleasures of the film. Another is the sly performance of Ms. Delpy, who is understated yet magnetic as the wife who, though an art curator, turns out to be as skilled in the ways of narrative construction as her husband.

What’s best here, however, is Mr. Grant, who delivers a sneer that can reduce a man to rubble. When Sinclair takes a look at young Liam’s first novel, he derides it as “passable airport fiction.” “That’s years of work!” protests the tutor. “Really? How frustrating,” Sinclair responds. He’s capable of the most restrained yet spectacular cruelty: When he refers with a smile to his wife as “the missing mother,” he turns out to be referring to her having been far away, in Venice, when their son Felix died by suicide two years before. This event is the defining fact underlying the family’s tense relations. A flashback scene, in which Sinclair was interviewed in front of a large audience, underlines how angry he becomes when the subject is broached, and Mr. Grant does righteous fury almost as well as dismissive saltiness.

Mr. McCormack, an Irish actor who played a gigolo against Emma Thompson’s spinster in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” is the weak link of the film; he has more the bland, affectless air of a catalog model than that of an intense literary nerd, and the way first-time director Alice Troughton keeps finding reasons for him to strip to the waist suggests she thinks of him as eye candy. It’s hard to believe Liam spends more time in the library than he does in the gym.

Through him, Ms. Troughton and her screenwriter, Alex MacKeith, do a mediocre job of capturing the spirit of the literary life, which they seem to conceive of as primarily about aristocratic trappings out of Downton Abbey that awe the young man, and the script builds a shaky plot around a cliché—good writers borrow, great writers steal—that is treated as one of Sinclair’s mischievous and brilliant insights. Their overuse of that one-liner (a paraphrase of a point made by T.S. Eliot), which is itself shopworn and not particularly useful, lends the film a too-heavy element of foreshadowing that clunky literalization is on the way. To the extent this literary feud evolves into a thriller, it’s not an especially thrilling one.