Richard the 3rd is one of England's more contentious kings. Most of the world is aware of him because of Shakespeare's play. Because it's one of Shakespeare's better written plays, it gets presented regularly, and new film versions come out about once a decade. And that means we all know he's an ugly, hunch-backed, evil, child-murdering usurper. Except ... history doesn't particularly support this.

For those who think Shakespeare's proximity in time to Richard make the play more "accurate," you need to understand first (as pointed out by our protagonist) that Shakespeare wrote his play 100 years after Richard's death. In a time when accurate histories of the royals were non-existent, and Richard was a reviled and defeated "usurper" because history is written by the winners. And secondly (not mentioned in this movie), Shakespeare lived and worked at the whim of Queen Elizabeth. He took multiple opportunities in his plays to write long (and usually boring) speeches aggrandizing her relatives - "accuracy" had nothing to do with it, it was all aimed at the survival of his theatre group. He was a great writer, but he was more subject to the whims of the reigning queen than modern playwrights are to current politics.

Our protagonist is Philippa Langley (the link is to Wikipedia - she's a real person), played by Sally Hawkins. After seeing a performance of Shakespeare's Richard III, Langley begins to think the portrayal of Richard in that play may be inaccurate. She begins to research him, which leads her to the local Richard the Third Society (in reality, Langley started her local society: my assumption is that this arrangement made the storyline run more smoothly). She becomes determined to "pay her respects" to this king ... except that nobody knew where he was buried. She's haunted by visions of Richard (Harry Lloyd), and begins to follow up on all the research done into where he might be buried. All while struggling with work problems, odd relationship arrangements, two kids, and myalgic encephalomyelitis (better known as "Chronic Fatigue").

Hawkins' performance has been much lauded, and it's good. But I didn't think it stood out all that much from the very good bunch of actors around her. And the biggest problem for me was that this felt a lot like a TV-movie-of-the-week - "heroine struggles against disease and circumstances and evil academia to triumph and be proven right in the end." The fact that it's pretty much all accurate to reality doesn't change that much. I watched this in part because Stephen Frears directed two of my favourite movies ("Dangerous Liaisons" and "High Fidelity") but conveniently forgot his uneven track record (best represented here by "Tamara Drewe" - which was at least "interesting" if not "good"). I liked this, but it wasn't a stand-out.