Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Layburn (2019)
The Curzon Mayfair bar was doing a roaring trade. The filmgoers in the packed foyer for the UK premiere of Ordinary Love looked different from the London Film Festival audiences-in-waiting at BFI or the Festival’s pop-up cinema in Embankment Gardens. More dressed up, in spite of the pouring rain outside. More self-aware. I got the (prejudiced) sense of people more eager to be seen at a premiere than to see a film. Once the doors opened, it took a long time for the theatre to fill up. Once the screening was finally (and belatedly) underway, there was a continuing relay of exits and re-entrances. I wondered what Mads Brügger would have made of all these toilet trips. Especially since this cancer drama, at ninety-two minutes, more or less obeys Brügger’s law (see Cold Case Hammarskjöld).
The film’s opening shot shows a man and a woman from a distance and in profile, walking together down a seafront street. He is lofty Liam Neeson, she is pint-sized Lesley Manville and the height discrepancy makes you smile. He seems to walk slowly but effortlessly; her gait is brightly determined, and needs to be to keep up with him. It’s an instantly appealing start to the third feature that Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn have made together. The previous one was Good Vibrations (2012) and, like that film, Ordinary Love is set in Belfast. The man and the woman are a married couple, Tom and Joan Thompson. When they get back home, Joan reminds Tom it’s high time their Christmas decorations came down – his job, since she put them up. Their banter is humorous and easy but the living room is shadowed. The decorations are somehow bleak, though maybe it’s just the usual effect of tree lights and tinsel that have been up too long. Following their brisk walk, Tom decides to have a beer and Joan a shower. That’s when she discovers a swelling in her left breast.
Ordinary Love has a tough subject but Owen McCafferty’s screenplay takes the easy option in dramatising the sense of isolation experienced by cancer sufferers and those closest to them. Joan and Tom literally have no one else to turn to. Neither appears to have any friends or relations. Their only child, Debbie, died suddenly (it seems as a young adult and a few years ago) in undisclosed circumstances. We don’t get an idea of how the couple, seemingly retired, spent their time before her cancer diagnosis – beyond watching television, supermarket shopping and going for short walks. Tom keeps tropical fish but the film forgets about them after a half-hour or so. Joan’s illness doesn’t interfere with either routine activities or future plans.
Late on in the story, she confides in Peter (David Wilmot), who taught Debbie in primary school and is now being treated in the same cancer unit as Joan, though he, unlike her, is terminally ill. When their daughter died, says Joan, Tom ‘stopped working – he just seemed to give up and I suppose I did too’ (or words to that effect). Debbie’s death clearly robbed her parents of a great deal but it’s convenient to the film-makers, who use the couple’s childlessness to confirm their solitude. I guess it’s possible this approach reflects budgetary constraints; whatever the reason, it makes for a simplistic picture of their plight. Ordinary Love would create a more real sense of the protagonists’ loneliness if they were shown as suddenly cut off from the social world they used to inhabit – even while friends who are not fighting cancer try to help and sympathise.
What work Tom stopped doing isn’t clear and Liam Neeson’s presence in the role sheds no light. It’s easy to understand why Barros D’Sa and Leyburn were keen to have him in the film. As the world’s most famous Northern Irish actor, Neeson is uniquely qualified to fit naturally in a Belfast setting and be a star draw. I couldn’t get a handle on Tom so it may be unfair to say he seems wrong for the part. But the dialogue implies a man who acts on impulse, often speaks rashly and isn’t able to think things through. Neeson looks more like a writer or a retired academic. Although he’s sometimes affecting and funny, his Tom isn’t convincingly individual, as distinct from the distraught husband of a cancer patient.
The screenplay is no more descriptive of Joan but that’s less of a problem, thanks to Lesley Manville. Her fine performance is fearless and precise. Her inflections, gestures and movements make Joan so thoroughly real that her completeness as a character never seems an issue. It goes almost without saying that Manville is compelling to watch when Joan, during chemotherapy, loses her hair and very nearly her will to live. The actress is still more remarkable expressing Joan’s fear as she undergoes hospital tests pre-diagnosis – and her inner exhaustion before the outward signs of that are as prominent as they later become. Joan and Tom are often impatient with each other and exchange plenty of cross words but there’s only one moment when she explodes in fury. Lesley Manville makes this truly powerful.
It would hardly have been possible after his partnership with Manville in the TV sitcom Mum to cast Peter Mullan as Tom yet I couldn’t help thinking he’d have been more physically right and a better temperamental fit for the role. That said, there is chemistry between Liam Neeson and Manville, and they’re believable as a long-married couple. There’s a spark too between her and David Wilmot. It may just be that Manville has developed into one of those rare performers who seem to connect with whoever they share a screen with. Anyway, the conversations between Joan and Peter are persuasive in suggesting he’s someone she can talk with intimately but calmly – a man more receptive to, and capable of, reflective thought than her husband is.
Ordinary Love is strong in its description of Joan’s treatment – not just the gruelling effects of chemotherapy but also the repetitive, boring aspects of her and Tom’s visits to hospital: the car journey, hanging about in waiting rooms, tea and a scone in the café. Stronger still is the cast of other cancer patients – some in for the long haul, others more transient presences. Joan quickly develops from a newcomer asking questions about what chemo’s like to a relative old hand, sensitively trying to reassure another, shockingly young, breast cancer patient (Mary Lindsay). Joan’s natural sociability in this kind of situation also has the effect of reinforcing the puzzle of how friendless she is.
Why ‘ordinary’ love? Michael Haneke, when he made a film about an enduring marriage invaded by serious illness, didn’t feel the need for an adjective in the title. Perhaps Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Layburn wouldn’t have either, if Haneke hadn’t got in first with plain Amour (2012). More likely, though, the ‘ordinary’ is virtually ironic – as it was in the title of Robert Redford’s Ordinary People: appearances are deceptive; the people on screen and what they’re struggling with, though highly relatable, are extraordinary. Seeing the film in these terms may or may not take account of an interesting, thornier aspect of Owen McCafferty’s screenplay. That one outburst of scalding anger from Joan comes when Tom says they’re in this together. She yells back at him that her ordeal is much worse than his – he just has to cope. Her mood is very different but the message essentially the same when, over a cup of tea with Peter, Joan says she thinks everyone is finally alone.
The story concludes around the same time of year at which it began, with Christmas decorations going back up. Joan’s chemotherapy is over; she’s had a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction surgery. As things stand, she seems to be clear of cancer. She and Tom have just been to Peter’s funeral, and Tom suggests they invite his bereaved, much younger partner Stephen (Amit Shah) to spend Christmas with them. Joan isn’t so keen – a drink perhaps but not on Christmas Day. Tom accepts this but is eager to phone Stephen instantly. ‘Shall I call or will you?’ he asks. (This and the quotes that follow are, again, approximate.) ‘You do it,’ she replies. In one sense, Tom, who still expects Joan to do things for them both, didn’t want to hear that (Liam Neeson registers this very amusingly). But the answer also gives him the chance to pursue the possibility of Stephen spending the big day with them. ‘I’m not saying he will but what if he says-‘: Joan cuts him off. ‘If you want to ask him for Christmas Day, go ahead’, she says with a smile. She then turns back to the tinsel, looking grim.
It’s as if Stephen’s presence, in confirming Peter’s absence, will remind Joan she’s outnumbered. In the course of Ordinary Love, she and Tom have more than once repeated that opening walk along the seafront. The pace of it has varied but the odds against closing the film with another such walk have shortened. This duly happens but the symmetry of start and finish is meaningful. The resumption of an outwardly unchanged routine serves to emphasise a radical shift in the couple’s relationship. Joan still loves her husband. She knows he loves her and will always be at her side. Yet she also seems to know she’s on her own.
12 October 2019
