Chris Knipp
04-17-2009, 02:48 PM
IS ANYBODY THERE? (John Crowley 2009)
Giving up the ghost
Review by Chris Knipp
Is Anybody There? is a rather depressing little film with Michael Caine (decrepit and, at first, suicidal) and a creepy little boy (Bill Milner from the delightful Son of Rambow (http://www.cinescene.com/knipp/redbelt.htm#son) ). Edward, who's eleven, lives in an old people's home his parents run, and Clarance (Caine) is a retired magician who comes very unwillingly to live there too. He keeps his run-down tour van parked in the yard, like the crazy person who used to camp in Alan Bennett's driveway, and hopes to escape in it soon. Clarance, who misses his late wife, rages against the dying of the light, but he is encountering a lot of humiliations. When he finds Edward has an unhealthy obsession with dying and is tape recording the last gasps of expiring inmates of the home to capture their ghosts, he realizes the boy is in a worse place than he is. As two outcasts, Edward and Clarance bond. A suicidal old man and a pre-teen pursuer of ghosts: at first, it's almost as self-consciously morbid as Harold and Maude.
There was much hope that this would be a special film, given its director's history of prize-winning London and New York productions of Martin McDonagh's Pillowman, a promising (if incomprehensibly Irish) first film, Intermission (with Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy) and his searing and bold Boy A (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=1108) . This new film is edited nicely: it flits from scene to scene without fanfare. The early scenes seem unpromising, but that's the English attitude, isn't it, that life is pinched and messy but you make the best of it? The fact is, this is a pretty marked comedown after Pillowman and Boy A.
It is an actor's showcase, though. Crowley is a good director and he gets able work from all his cast. Michael Caine's on-screen performances (he's Sir Michael now) are all master classes in film acting and he's magnificent as Clarance. Bill Milner is wonderfully dry and snarky and natural. Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey are good as Edward's two parents, struggling to deal with the 39-year-old dad's lust for an 18-year-old nurse's aide and to make a go of the home after just a year, in the late Eighties. A half dozen choice character actors are lightly delineated as the main oldsters.
To state the obvious, a film about a retirement home is a good way to talk about aging, and you can round out your story by having your characters die. They're over the hill: departing this life comes naturally to them. No plot twists necessary.
But a film about a retirement home isn't necessarily a bold way to deal with the hard subject of death. There is a tremendous danger of drifting into sentimentality and cuteness. And conventionality. This is the third little English film at least that I've seen recently about a little run-down old people's home where they all live together as a big dysfunctional family. The idea is even more thoroughly developed, without an aging magician or morbid boy, in the Vanessa Redgrave vehicle, How About You? (2007), which deals with both the group dynamics and the dying process a bit more memorably. But I remember my mother's retirement high rise and find these quaint English versions false in a whole lot of ways. (Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=945) is good, but doesn't fit my mother's experience at all either.) The writer of Is Anybody There?, Peter Harness, himself grew up in an old people's home. But this is a tough subject, after all, and nobody knows what dying's like till they're way beyond telling.
I'm going to give away the ending: Clarance dies. Where the film excels is in how it makes this a moment of triumph for everyone. It is obviously a release for Clarance: he wanted to "top" himself at the outset. But he has passed on some good magic tricks to Edward, and also convinced the kid that when you die, you die. So when Clarance gives up the ghost, to honor his elderly friend Edward gives up his ghost obsession. With that the house cheers up, his mum and dad start having fun together, and he starts to play soccer; he becomes a real boy. There's a lovely moment when one of the old men gets up and kicks a ball around with Edward and another kid--a reminder that some eighty-year-olds can still get frisky. These self-conscious oldster comedies too often tend to forget that for most of its running time, even old age is about living, not dying.
U.S. theatrical release date: April 17, 2009 (limited; SF Bay Area, April 24).
Giving up the ghost
Review by Chris Knipp
Is Anybody There? is a rather depressing little film with Michael Caine (decrepit and, at first, suicidal) and a creepy little boy (Bill Milner from the delightful Son of Rambow (http://www.cinescene.com/knipp/redbelt.htm#son) ). Edward, who's eleven, lives in an old people's home his parents run, and Clarance (Caine) is a retired magician who comes very unwillingly to live there too. He keeps his run-down tour van parked in the yard, like the crazy person who used to camp in Alan Bennett's driveway, and hopes to escape in it soon. Clarance, who misses his late wife, rages against the dying of the light, but he is encountering a lot of humiliations. When he finds Edward has an unhealthy obsession with dying and is tape recording the last gasps of expiring inmates of the home to capture their ghosts, he realizes the boy is in a worse place than he is. As two outcasts, Edward and Clarance bond. A suicidal old man and a pre-teen pursuer of ghosts: at first, it's almost as self-consciously morbid as Harold and Maude.
There was much hope that this would be a special film, given its director's history of prize-winning London and New York productions of Martin McDonagh's Pillowman, a promising (if incomprehensibly Irish) first film, Intermission (with Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy) and his searing and bold Boy A (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=1108) . This new film is edited nicely: it flits from scene to scene without fanfare. The early scenes seem unpromising, but that's the English attitude, isn't it, that life is pinched and messy but you make the best of it? The fact is, this is a pretty marked comedown after Pillowman and Boy A.
It is an actor's showcase, though. Crowley is a good director and he gets able work from all his cast. Michael Caine's on-screen performances (he's Sir Michael now) are all master classes in film acting and he's magnificent as Clarance. Bill Milner is wonderfully dry and snarky and natural. Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey are good as Edward's two parents, struggling to deal with the 39-year-old dad's lust for an 18-year-old nurse's aide and to make a go of the home after just a year, in the late Eighties. A half dozen choice character actors are lightly delineated as the main oldsters.
To state the obvious, a film about a retirement home is a good way to talk about aging, and you can round out your story by having your characters die. They're over the hill: departing this life comes naturally to them. No plot twists necessary.
But a film about a retirement home isn't necessarily a bold way to deal with the hard subject of death. There is a tremendous danger of drifting into sentimentality and cuteness. And conventionality. This is the third little English film at least that I've seen recently about a little run-down old people's home where they all live together as a big dysfunctional family. The idea is even more thoroughly developed, without an aging magician or morbid boy, in the Vanessa Redgrave vehicle, How About You? (2007), which deals with both the group dynamics and the dying process a bit more memorably. But I remember my mother's retirement high rise and find these quaint English versions false in a whole lot of ways. (Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=945) is good, but doesn't fit my mother's experience at all either.) The writer of Is Anybody There?, Peter Harness, himself grew up in an old people's home. But this is a tough subject, after all, and nobody knows what dying's like till they're way beyond telling.
I'm going to give away the ending: Clarance dies. Where the film excels is in how it makes this a moment of triumph for everyone. It is obviously a release for Clarance: he wanted to "top" himself at the outset. But he has passed on some good magic tricks to Edward, and also convinced the kid that when you die, you die. So when Clarance gives up the ghost, to honor his elderly friend Edward gives up his ghost obsession. With that the house cheers up, his mum and dad start having fun together, and he starts to play soccer; he becomes a real boy. There's a lovely moment when one of the old men gets up and kicks a ball around with Edward and another kid--a reminder that some eighty-year-olds can still get frisky. These self-conscious oldster comedies too often tend to forget that for most of its running time, even old age is about living, not dying.
U.S. theatrical release date: April 17, 2009 (limited; SF Bay Area, April 24).