Mona Lisa: Hoskins's Tender London Noir

Bob Hoskins was thirteen years into a career of playing men who took up more room than they were entitled to when Neil Jordan cast him as George, a man who has just discovered he has no room at all. Mona Lisa opens with George walking out of prison after seven years, wearing a suit that was fashionable when he went in, carrying flowers, and heading for a house that no longer wants him. Within ninety seconds the film has told you everything about its hero: he has done his time loyally, he expects loyalty back, and he is going to spend the entire picture being wrong about what people owe him.

It is a noir, structurally, and it wears the pattern openly. The man out of prison. The favour called in by the boss he took the fall for. The woman in the back of the car. The descent, one contact at a time, into a city’s underneath. What Jordan does with that pattern is the film’s whole reason for existing, and it involves being far crueller and far kinder than the genre usually manages in the same ninety minutes.

The job

George’s old employer is Denny Mortwell, played by Michael Caine in one of the least ingratiating performances of his career — a soft-voiced, genial, entirely reptilian man who dispenses affection the way you might oil a hinge. Caine had spent decades being the most likeable presence in British films. Here he weaponises the likeability, and it is genuinely unpleasant to watch.

Mortwell’s gift to George is a job: driving. The passenger is Simone (Cathy Tyson), a high-class call girl who moves between hotel suites in the West End and needs a man at the wheel who will keep his mouth shut. The two of them despise each other on sight, along entirely legible lines — she thinks he is a thug in a bad jacket, he thinks she is a tart with airs — and Jordan takes his time dismantling that, mostly through the small humiliations of a working relationship. She makes him buy better clothes. He resents it and complies. It is one of the sharpest class comedies in 1980s British cinema, and it is happening inside a crime film.

Then Simone asks him for something. There is a girl she used to know from the streets around King’s Cross, a girl called Cathy who has disappeared into the lower reaches of the trade, and Simone wants George to find her. George, who has been looking for a purpose since the prison gate, takes the errand as a knighthood.

What George is actually doing

The engine of Mona Lisa is a misreading, and Jordan lets it run for a very long time before he touches it. George believes he is in a love story. He believes the search for Cathy is the proof of devotion that will make Simone see him properly. Every piece of evidence the film supplies him about who Simone is, what she wants, and what he is to her, he processes through a romantic novel he has been writing in his head since roughly 1979.

Hoskins plays this without a milligram of self-pity, which is why it works. His George is funny, blunt, physically comic, and constantly, quietly wounded. The performance won him Best Actor at Cannes in 1986 along with a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, and it earned an Oscar nomination, and the acclaim was for the tenderness rather than the menace. The menace was never in doubt; Hoskins could do a dangerous man in his sleep. What is startling is how nakedly he lets George want to be good, in a film that has already decided goodness is a category error in this postcode.

Robbie Coltrane provides the film’s oxygen as Thomas, George’s friend, a man who tinkers with unsellable gadgets and reads pulp thrillers and functions as the audience’s sane relative. Every scene between Hoskins and Coltrane is a small holiday from the plot, and Jordan uses them structurally: they are where George says out loud the story he has been telling himself, so we can hear how thin it sounds in daylight.

The craft: a city with an underneath

Roger Pratt shot Mona Lisa in a London that had not yet been photographed to death — the King’s Cross of the mid-1980s, before the money came, all wet tarmac, arcade light and doorways. The film’s geography is a moral diagram. The West End hotels are clean, warm and lethal. The streets George trawls looking for Cathy are grim and, crucially, populated by people the film treats as people. Jordan does not shoot the sex trade as a horror-show tableau for the hero to be appalled by. He shoots it as work, done by the tired, and George’s appalled reaction is presented as slightly naive.

The title music is the other great craft decision. Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa” plays over George’s world, a song about looking at a beautiful, unreadable surface and pouring your own meaning into it, and Jordan deploys it with total sincerity. The joke, if it is one, is that George never notices the song is about him. He hears a love song. It is a diagnosis.

The other thing Pratt’s camera is doing is looking at London as a foreigner. Jordan is Irish, and Mona Lisa was made by a man who had arrived in the city recently enough to still find it legible — the class signals, the accents, the invisible lines about who is permitted where. An English director would have taken all of it as furniture. Jordan films the geography of the British class system as though it were an exotic customs regime, which is exactly what makes the George-and-Simone material land: their war is about deportment, and neither of them can quite name the rules they are fighting over.

The film came from HandMade Films, George Harrison’s company, and it belongs to the brief window when HandMade was underwriting genuinely strange British pictures. Jordan co-wrote it with David Leland, and the two of them share a taste for endings that refuse to arrive where the emotional architecture has been promising.

The real ancestor

Everyone reaches for Taxi Driver, and it is not wrong — the driver, the vice, the compulsion to rescue a young woman who has not requested rescue. Jordan has never pretended otherwise. But the deeper ancestor is Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, the 1950 film that first found this exact London: a city of small operators with big dreams, photographed at night, where a man’s fatal quality is his belief that he is one good scheme away from being someone. Harry Fabian and George are the same animal at different temperatures. Fabian wants to be a somebody. George wants to be a hero. The city has the same answer for both.

For the counter-example, put it next to The Long Good Friday, where Hoskins plays a man with the opposite problem — Harold Shand’s tragedy is that he understands his world perfectly right up until the ten minutes when he does not. Watching the two performances together is the best short course available in what Hoskins could do. And Get Carter makes the useful contrast in temperature: Hodges’s film denies its hero every illusion, while Jordan hands his hero an illusion and films him living inside it.

A verdict, argued

Mona Lisa has a reputation as the soft one — the British crime film with feelings — and that reading undersells how hard it actually is. Jordan’s structure is a trap. He spends an hour making you complicit in George’s romance, encouraging exactly the sentimentality the film will later charge you for, and the last act arrives as a bill. The tenderness is real. It is also the mechanism.

The film’s flaws are visible. The middle sags slightly under the weight of the search. Some of the underworld figures are thinner than the leads deserve. Cathy Tyson, extraordinary in a very difficult part, is given a character the screenplay deliberately withholds, which is dramatically correct and occasionally frustrating; Simone is a locked box because George cannot open her, and the film’s fidelity to his viewpoint costs us hers.

None of that touches the achievement. This is the best thing Neil Jordan made before The Crying Game, and it contains a performance that justifies Hoskins’s entire reputation in one arc. It turns up regularly on the arthouse streaming services and has had a decent restoration; it repays a proper screen, mostly because Pratt’s night photography turns to soup on a phone.

Spoilers below

Stop here if you have not seen it. The last twenty minutes are the point of the previous seventy.

George finds Cathy. The search that George has treated as chivalry has been, from the first request, an errand run on Simone’s behalf for reasons that have nothing to do with George and everything to do with a love he never suspected existed. Simone’s interest in Cathy is her own, and it is neither charitable nor abstract. George’s discovery of this is played by Hoskins as physical injury, and Jordan does not spare him: the man’s grand romantic gesture is revealed as a taxi service he was too flattered to identify.

Worse, his hurt is instantly and ordinarily ugly. The gentle man curdles into something violent and self-pitying, and the film insists that this was always in him — the chivalry and the possessiveness were the same substance, and only one of them had been called upon. Mortwell and Anderson, the pimp, are dealt with by the plot; the film is not really interested in whether the villains lose. It is interested in whether George can survive learning that Simone was never a Mona Lisa at all, only a woman with her own life, photographed by a man determined to see a mystery.

The coda gives him Thomas, the seafront, and his daughter, which is the closest Jordan comes to mercy. It is not redemption. It is a man being allowed to go home, having been wrong about everything, still alive. For this genre, that is nearly generous.