Featured Movies
Partners
Growing Out
A young boy growing up in an old people's home strikes up a friendship with a retired magician in this drama starring Michael Caine
What a peculiarly sour little film this is. It says something when, during the screening this writer attended, the projectionist accidentally got his reels mixed up and screened a few moments of doomy Bergmanesque vampire flick Let The Right One In - and it came as a bit of light relief. British cinema loves to fetishize northern childhoods - that mix of grit and sentimentality is irresistible - and screenwriter Peter Harness has called on boyhood memories of being raised in his parents-run nursing home in Hornsea, east Yorkshire, in the 1980s. Growing up in such an environment, 10-year-old Edward (Bill Milner, Son Of Rambow) is closer in proximity to death than most children. Perhaps as a consequence he's morbidly obsessed with the afterlife, rigging up mics in the rooms of those about to snuff it, in an attempt to record the sound of the soul as it leaves the body. "I wonder if this is how the Yorkshire Ripper started?" frets dad (David Morrissey). Widowed, suicidal magician 'The Amazing' Clarence (Michael Caine), initially prefers to live in his van in the grounds, like Alan Bennett's Old Lady, but is soon moved into the boy's old bedroom. "I used to have Paddington Bear wallpaper" glums Edward. "I used to have a beautiful wife and all my own teeth" retorts Clarence. Before long, the ersatz (grand)father figure is giving Edward conjuring lessons and Edward is teaching the old dog some new tricks, and you can bet there'll be some life-lessons on both sides before checking-out time. After Paradise Grove and How About You, this is the UK's third melodrama since 2003 to be set in a retirement home. Given the familiar set-up, Is Anybody There? might reasonably be expected to play out as some rambunctious, feelgood weepie, a cross between Harold And Maude and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, in which an anarchic Clarence shakes up folks young and old. This isn't that film. Despite Caine half-heartedly quoting Dylan Thomas, this hardly rages against the dying of the light - just whinges irritably about Seasonal Affective Disorder. 'Irascible but loveable' was probably the general idea, but Caine's Clarence, self-pitying and aggressive, is really just repellent - as sinister as some forgotten, moulting old teddy bear with a shredded ear and an eye dangling from its socket, glowering accusatorily from the toybox in the dead of night. "You accumulate regrets and they stick to you like old bruises" is one of his unwanted observations. "On his grave they'll write, 'He was born, he effed it up, then he died'" is another. His senile dementia only serves to make him more, not less, troubling, as if he might suddenly start slapping Edward about without warning. Mainly, we're left with the overriding image of a miserable old man shouting angrily at a creepy little boy and the little boy swearing back at him, until one of them collapses. The lesson being: death is inevitable and there's no life after death and you'd better get used to it - so bloody well buck up before I bray thee, lad. Meanwhile, as a mullet with a mid-life crisis, Morrissey slips back into his 'It's right grim oop North, in't it?' default mode, and Anne-Marie Duff mithers in the background as mum. Trembling like liver-spotted jellies, the supporting cast of legendary British thesps is unforgivably wasted, their tiny cameos left to riff on past glories. Leslie Phillips, therefore, is a dirty old man, while Peter Vaughan comes on like a pensionable version of Grouty from 'Porridge', warning Caine's new inmate, "The first night's the worst, laddie." It's a film to respect or admire from a distance, rather than like or, you know, actually enjoy. There's so much collective talent here, from that vintage cast, to composer Joby Talbot ('The League Of Gentlemen'; The Divine Comedy), along with the producers (Little Miss Sunshine) - and Crowley himself, director of Channel 4's superb BAFTA-winning teleplay 'Boy A.' So it's a pity that, aside from one fantastically surreal image of an occupied bodybag descending on a Stannah stair lift, the direction's so staid, and the tone misfires so badly. Sadly, one suspects that the film's title may also be hostaged to fortune as far as potential audiences are concerned. Is anybody there? No - they're all next door watching X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Verdict Like pulling a stoat out of a top hat when you're expecting a bunny. |
