Nine years after the black comedy How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Richard E. Grant reprises playing a man working in advertising who suddenly becomes disillusioned with the point of it all and quits to try his luck at poetry. But since this is in the 1930s London of George Orwell's source novel, elements of the story mirroring episodes in the writer's own life, he soon ends up in financial freefall and squandering what little he receives from his new vocation on costly splurges to escape his self-created new prison, now one imposed by poverty rather than creative prostitution.
Grant was born for this role, with his natural gift for conveying neurotic mania, and Helena Bonham Carter as his put-upon girlfriend is a useful addition too. The dialogue is a constant shower of wit and the London of the period, even if conveniently polarised into just a downtrodden working-class world and an upper-class echelon, is still colourfully depicted. Being so much of its time, it probably doesn't achieve anything politically the way Orwell would have intended, but is great entertainment all the same.
7/10
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