Ralph Fiennes’ ‘Conclave’ followup ‘The Choral’ is a forgettable, sloppy mess

TORONTO — You come to “The Choral,” the new WWI movie starring Ralph Fiennes that had its world premiere Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, looking for harmony.

Two hours later, you sprint out having been pelted for hours by screeching discord.

Some of that head-butting is of the dramatic persuasion.

A brilliant new chorus master, Dr. Guthrie (Fiennes), arrives in a small English village after voluntarily spending several years living abroad in Germany. That continental mingling rubs locals the wrong way. Their sons are fighting on the front lines, and this tone deaf guy keeps quoting Goethe.

He also has “peculiarities” — a k a, he’s gay. He hides a secret that his boyfriend is in the German Navy.

Most of the clashing, however, happens behind the camera between good intentions and stunningly poor execution. 

Anybody with a BritBox account knows exactly what director Nicholas Hytner and writer Alan Bennett were trying to do. 

A room full of scrappy, working-class, aurally iffy Brits are supposed to find healing, togetherness and compassion through the power of music. That sort of “all together now, chaps!” UK roadmap is not far from that of “Pride” or “Calendar Girls.”

But, wow, do the frequent collaborators — who make terrific theater and skippable films — come nowhere remotely close to delivering such a movie.

What they’ve chopped up is a cacophony of half-baked characters and rushed ideas that leave you puzzled and unsatisfied. A better title would be “The Chore.”

First off, what exactly makes Guthrie such a genius? The choir is already decent when he shows up, despite missing adult men who are at war, and we don’t witness him improve them much, a la “Sister Act” and “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” 

He picks an oratorio by English composer Sir Edward Elgar to mollify the patriotic town, casts it with the strongest singers and then occasionally shouts at them. That’s most of the film.

Because Fiennes can be commanding on command, the actor distracts somewhat from the fact Guthrie barely budges from where he starts. He doesn’t reveal much about himself, and he concedes a morsel of ground in the last half hour.

The actor had more meat to chew on in a single sentence of last year’s “Conclave” than in the entire two hours of “The Choral.”

And he’s handed one of the film’s worst lines, greeted by the kind of silence you’d find in outer space or in a sensory deprivation chamber.

When young Clyde (Jacob Dudman), a soldier with a sumptuous voice, returns from the war missing an arm, Fiennes is forced to utter this clunker:

“Funnily enough, there are people who would give their right arm to do what you can do.”

All’s quiet at the world premiere!

Clyde — very good Dudman, by the way, should appear in more movies — is one the better developed of the bland basses, tenors, sopranos and altos. He comes closest to wringing out a tear.

The rest are a blur.

There are hormonal crushes among the teens, as the 17-year-old men are weeks away from being enlisted. And the older members, played by the likes of Roger Allam and Alun Armstrong, worry for their faraway children, and resist a changing world. There’s a bizarre subplot about a local prostitute.

We don’t get enough face time with any one person to be drawn in by their hopes and fears, and the whole exercise is an emotionless belly flop. 

“The Choral” is also very stagey, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it began as a draft of a play that gathered dust in a drawer. Not the top drawer, mind you.

Bennett, whose last film “Allelujah!” made me lose my religion, writes with overblown theatricality. His speeches, such as one in which Clyde compares purgatory to No Man’s Land, are too puffy for the screen.

All the while, Hytner directs like he’s hallucinated he’s still at the National Theatre in London. The town’s rehearsal hall’s lighting looks like a scene out of “Doubt.”

Their mutual reliance on sledgehammer style reminds me of Edward Elgar’s most famous tune. It’s a lot of pomp and circumstance.