Gideon's Daughter

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What’s the Story?

Gideon Warner (Bill Nighy) is a self-made man, a chauffeur's son who manages to become a public-relations wizard in London. Widowed, he has a sexy lover and his firm is trying to land a prestigious project managing a huge New Year's Eve 1999 bash, which the queen will attend. But Gideon is distracted. He worries about his detached teen daughter Natasha (Emily Blunt). Gideon makes a connection across social boundaries when he meets Stella (Miranda Richardson), whose young son was hit by a truck and killed. Free-spirited and upbeat despite her deep grief, Stella introduces Gideon to her un-posh environment. Gideon reveals to her the family tragedy for which Natasha has apparently never forgiven him. The irony, of course, is that an in-demand PR professional like Gideon can't communicate with his child. As he grows more distracted with Natasha and Stella, Gideon finds himself blanking out at work. His apathy and pointless non-sequitur remarks are mistaken by his clients as signs of brilliance and wisdom, and his plans for the millennium celebrations are put into action. Meanwhile he makes a desperate bid to reconcile with his daughter.

Is It Any Good?

Gideon's Daughter is not a formulaic Hollywood product, but a thoughtful British drama combining real-life events and personalities of the recent past with a fictional father-daughter divide. The film has a puzzling set-up and chronology, as a man named Sneath (Robert Lindsay) begins dictating Gideon's story to his secretary. It helps to know that Sneath was a character in a previous BBC drama by writer-director Stephen Poliakoff entitled Friends and Crocodiles; if you don't have knowledge of late 20th-century British events, such as the building of the Millennium Dome or the election of the Tony Blair government, much of the backdrop will be confusing.

The narrative is a slow-simmering affair, consistently watchable thanks to the witty dialogue, sterling performances, a lush orchestral music score, and no clearly predictable path for the story to go next. Of course, when it doesn't go much of anywhere (leaving the ultimate fate of the main players to Sneath's guesswork; even he isn't sure) … there you are.