Dir. John Crowley, UK, 2008, 95 mins
Cast: Michael Caine, Bill Milner, David Morrissey, Anne Marie Duff
Review by Carol Allen
Set in a seaside retirement home in 1987, the centre of the story is the friendship between ten year old Edward (Milner) and one of the residents, former magician Clarence (Caine).
In an effort to make ends meet, Edward's parents have turned their house into a care home for the elderly. What with Mum (Duff) struggling to keep the business going and Dad (Morrissey) going through a mid life crisis, which causes him to cast lustful eyes on their teenage housekeeper (Linzey Cocker), Edward is left very much to his own devices and as a result has developed a somewhat unhealthy obsession with death and the afterlife. Whenever one of the residents looks like dying, Edward hides his tape recorder under the bed in an attempt to capture the sound of the soul leaving the body. Then Clarence arrives, a itinerant magician, who's spent his later years touring his act from his caravan and is being reluctantly forced into the home by Social Services. Their relationship predictably gets off to a bumpy start but after Edward saves Clarence from a suicide attempt, a friendship gradually develops between this somewhat dour and odd little boy and the grumpy old man. Through this Edward realises that Clarence and indeed the other residents of the home were once young. The relationship also helps the boy get over his morbid fascination with death and the older man to come to terms with the mistakes of his past.
Caine is a many faceted delight as Clarence, a grumpy, depressive old man, who gradually reveals the disappointments of his life, most particularly his guilt and bitter regret over he wife he loved and let down. The scenes between him and Edward, when he teaches the young boy some of the tricks of the magician's trade along with lessons on life are very engaging. There's some effective and at one point very dark humour, when a magic show Clarence mounts for the residents goes disastrously wrong. There's also a great cast of veterans playing the other residents of home, who include Leslie Phillips, Rosemary Harris, Elizabeth Spriggs, Peter Vaughan and Sylvia Syms. They are though somewhat wasted, in that they all seem to have been given one characteristic each and the actors are left to flesh that out as best they can. They are also all depressingly senile and in some cases barking mad, apart from Harris as a former dance teacher with a bit of spark left.
Writer Peter Harness based the story on his own upbringing in such a home, so maybe that's the way he remembers it. There is though something about the writing, which doesn't always convince or engage us emotionally. Even Caine, with all his skills, doesn't move one as much as the actor is capable of doing and his later disintegration into senility is so startlingly sudden that it makes King Lear look as though he went into gradual decline.
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