Dir. Hattie Dalton, UK, 2010, 92 mins
Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Burke, JJ Field, Adam Robertson
Review by Carol Allen
This low budget independent British feature is a bit of a showcase for up and coming talent. Director Hattie Dalton, making her first feature, has been highly praised for her short films and the writer/producer Vaughan Sivell is regarded as a bit of a rising star as well. While in front of the camera are four first class young actors, including Benedict Cumberbatch, currently shooting a new series of the hit television series Sherlock, while alternating the roles of Frankenstein and The Monster at the National Theatre, and the versatile JJ Field, who made his mark as Michael Caine’s younger self in Last Orders and as pop star Heinz in Telstar. Sadly though the film promises more than it delivers.
It has an emotionally engaging story idea. Ben (Cumberbatch) is 29 and dying of cancer. Before he dies he is determined to visit once more his favourite place, a beautiful bay on an island off the Welsh coast. Accompanying him are his three best mates, Miles (Field), Davy (Burke) and Bill (Robertson). It’s not an easy journey, as they travel first by van, then by ferry and foot, carrying their luggage and sometimes Ben on an improvised cart. In the course of the journey all of them, not only Ben, have to come to terms with the loss of their youthful aspirations and the reality that is their lives. Or at least that’s the idea.
The problem is the film never really gets to grips with these issues clearly and the narrative drive of the story frequently gets buried by the film makers’ desire to shoot pretty pictures, such as the quartet struggling across the horizon and so on, which further the story not one jot. The actors do their best with limited opportunities. Cumberbatch rises to the physical problems of his character well (he did the same brilliantly when playing Stephen Hawking) but the film rarely gives him the chance to engage us emotionally. Field comes over most strongly as Miles, hiding beneath a cynical exterior his fear of losing to death those whom he loves and Burke and Robertson manage to communicate Davy’s need to be needed and Bill’s feeling of entrapment by the choices he’s already made in his young life. But they have to work hard to communicate that information through the murk of the diffuse story telling and we have to work hard to get it.
There are moments when the film comes to life – a scene where Miles’s watch is stolen by an evil little boy dressed as an angel for some unspecified country pageant and an encounter with an eccentric beachcomber (a lively cameo from Hugh Bonneville). As the film draws to its climax, it develops a little more clarity in its dramatic conflict but overall its self conscious air of artifice works against what should be the heartbreaking poignancy of its central character’s situation and our belief in the four young men and their journey.
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