Fred Schepisi (2001)

Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of Graham Swift’s Booker Prize-winning novel of 1996 is conscientious, sensitive and respectfully unimaginative.   The main characters are an elderly trio of friends and drinking buddies from South London. Swift’s title refers to, as well the traditional pub call, the instructions left by the recently deceased meat butcher Jack Dodds that his three old pals scatter his ashes at Margate.   Vic (an undertaker), Ray (who bets on the horses) and Lenny (an ex-boxer) are driven to the Kent coast by Jack’s adopted son Vince (a used car salesman).  Vince was taken in by Jack’s wife, Amy, when the child’s parents were killed in a World War II air raid.  Amy doesn’t accompany the men to Margate:  it’s her day for visiting her and Jack’s only biological child, the mentally retarded June, who’s spent the fifty years of her life in care.  (Jack would never have anything to do with his daughter.)  The journey is punctuated by flashbacks to the characters’ pasts and relationships with each other over the decades, and to a more recent conversation, immediately after Jack’s death, between Amy and Ray, who’ve long been fond of each other and who once had a brief affair.  The narrative structure mirrors that of the novel and is integral to the story’s themes – love and friendship, loyalty and betrayal, change and decay – but the whole thing is literal and even-paced; and some flashbacks are perfunctory – mere visualisations of remarks being made by the characters in the present.  It’s as if bringing the material to the screen is an end in itself.

The actors are good but the film’s lack of momentum has a curious effect:  you can somehow hear the call of ‘Action!’ at the start of each scene and see the actors start to perform.  This is especially the case with the conversations between Amy and Ray beside the Thames even though, once these get underway, the playing of Helen Mirren and Bob Hoskins is particularly good.  When Lenny and Vince come to blows, the physical expression of the tensions between them comes almost as a relief yet the sequence feels too prepared then doesn’t leave any residue.  In the flashbacks, Kelly Reilly has a wonderful bloom as the young Amy (J J Feild is young Jack).  The contrast between her and the increasingly tired and dowdy older woman is affecting – and there’s a fine moment when Helen Mirren’s laugh connects Amy to her younger self.  Mirren has to work hard to be this unglamorous but she does well.  In a cast that also includes Michael Caine (Jack), Tom Courtenay (Vic), David Hemmings (Lenny) and Ray Winstone (Vince), Bob Hoskins is outstanding.  (He also looks right at different ages – most of the actors do, thanks to the skill of the costume designer Jill Taylor and the hairstyling team.)  In the back of Vince’s car, Ray laughs along with the others but he does a lot of thinking too.  Hoskins is especially expressive in stillness and silence, as Ray sits alone in Canterbury Cathedral, which the men visit shortly before they reach their final destination.  The racing details are unusually credible:  Ray, trying to pick a winner for the dying Jack, is surrounded by Timeform and Raceform volumes; the commentary on the race that his selection wins is over the top but Fancy Free is meant to be running in the 3.30 at Doncaster and the race shown on screen really is at Town Moor.   Brian Tufano’s lighting of the long-ago flashbacks gives them a nostalgic sheen and the climactic image of the men throwing ashes into the sea in rainswept Margate is gravely beautiful.

27 January 2015