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4 hours ago
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It’s always funny when documentaries strategically pair a possibly boring topic with a famous face, just to sex them up. A History of NCP Car Parks By Tinie Tempah, say, or World’s Deadliest Sleep Disorders With Anna Maxwell Martin. So when I saw that Tom Hiddleston was hosting a National Geographic investigation into the destruction of Pompeii in AD79 (Disney+, from Thursday), there was no way I wasn’t watching.
The actor has famously sauntered through life’s most vaunted way stations: Eton, Cambridge, Rada, Kong: Skull Island. Privilege and perceived smugness have long been sticks to beat him with. It’s harder to argue he’s not qualified for this job, having earned a double first in classics. Here, he slips into the role of undergraduate detective. A real-life scholar is forced to cosplay as his don during their interview, addressing Hiddleston by surname, issuing prim little reprimands. Hiddleston even translates Latin headstones in the first episode. I don’t know what the ancient Roman for “screw it, I’m leaning in” is, but I think that’s what it means.
Smugness charges are harder to beat. Interviewing the founder of the Pompeii Survivors Project, Hiddleston determines that a spreadsheet is not visually satisfying enough. He “throws” the data in the air, where it hovers in transparent panes. “I’ve seen some Avengers movies,” he smirks. The scripted banter between Hiddleston and the specialists veers into godawful. I get why an actor might want to indulge being an archaeologist; it rarely works when academics are made to play at being actors.
Still: it’s not boring. At a crucial point in an interview, Hiddleston will interrupt and freeze the frame, holding up his fingers in a big L shape. He twists his fingers around, and the action spools back to an earlier point, to play out differently given the new information. Kinda like Wayne’s World. This is a revisionist history lesson, you see. In the collective imagination, the eruption of Vesuvius was instantaneous. “The story of Pompeii is a story of death.” In fact, it took a day for the town to be buried, he says – time enough for the humans there to make some choices. I can imagine him sitting backwards on a chair saying this.
I always wonder what academics make of popular educational shows. Is it painful for them to see their beloved subjects flattened into digestible narratives, or pumped up by appeals to emotion? Inevitably for an actor-led project, Pompeii: Out of Time is heavier on reconstruction than most documentaries. In fact, it prides itself on creative licence, aiming to tell evidence-based, plausible stories of three Romans on that day. “There’s only an hour until Vesuvius erupts,” warns our host in the present day, setting a countdown on his smartwatch. The undergraduate has been replaced by Jonathan Pine from The Night Manager.
It’s probably best Hiddleston does not feature in these recreations but stays in the present day. When the other actors take over, slowly but surely the documentary turns into a disaster film. Not being an academic, I love a disaster film. These flight-or-freeze sequences, written by Jessica Ruston with playwright Mark Ravenhill, are the best of the show, elegiac and moving. The writing and effects take us into what feels like a war zone. As for the eruption itself – experienced on screen it is shocking, majestic, brutal. Unexpected.
In the pandemic, with too much time on my hands, I rewatched Titanic. For most of my life, the sinking of that ship had been a pub quiz fact. After I saw the movie as a child, there were hackneyed gags about painting French girls and the fact that there was definitely room on the door. Something was different when I watched it alone in my flat, facing an uncertain future. I understood the scale of the human calamity in a way I hadn’t before. All those lives. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.
Something similar has prompted Hiddleston here. This wittily directed, thrilling documentary succeeds in making us feel as he did, visiting Pompeii for the first time as a young man. Empathy for the hopeless heroism of ordinary people on a catastrophic day. It’s a low-key tearjerker. What’s harder is feeling sympathy for a Cambridge-educated Golden Globe winner – but thanks to this surprising effort, I might even get there.
