Is Anybody There?

Most great actors when they feel they have amassed a distinguished body of work tend to rest on their laurels and just churn out pretty bog standard stuff in their later years. Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro seem to be doing it of late with "Hide & Seek" and "88 Minutes" not to mention their joint effort "Righteous Kill" while Laurence Olivier long ago pioneered the process with such beauties as "The Jazz Singer" and "The Betsy". Michael Caine however seems to have gone the opposite route. While his long career is dotted with some minor classics it is also flooded with some major turds. In fact between "Sleuth" (1972) and – "Sleuth" (2007) there has been "The Man Who Would Be King" –"Hannah And Her Sisters" - "Mona Lisa" but there has also been "The Hand" – "The Swarm" – "Jaws: The Revenge" - "Blame It On Rio" (a lot of)etc. Recently though Michael Caine clearly feels he has his money made and can afford to be to be a lot more selective in his choice of roles. He has had a consistent run of well received performances in well-received films and has become an integral part of the revitalised Batman franchise. His latest choice is possibly one of his best performances. In "Is Anybody there" he plays "The Amazing Clarence" a former magician who is forced by increasing dementia to move into a nursing home, very much against his will. The nursing home is also home to 10 year old Edward whose parents own and run the place. He is just as unhappy to be there as Clarence is and inevitably a prickly friendship develops between the (very) cantankerous old man and the (very) cheeky young boy. Edward is fascinated with death and ghosts, hardly surprising given his environment and Clarence teaches him magic tricks to try and pull him out of this morbidity and encourages him to make friends with kids his own age. Indeed Edward does start to impress his class-mates with his magic tricks (particularly the ones involving fire) and he decides to have a birthday party at the home – with Clarence as the entertainment. But Clarence's Alzheimers is getting worse and he is becoming more and more forgetful, when it matters most. This is a beautifully acted film by both Caine and Bill Milner as Edward. Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey perform solidly as the parents while the residents of the home are played by a number of established faces including Leslie Phillips as a man with a passion for telling very dirty jokes – particularly to members of the clergy. The film is full of dark humour but is never patronising and frequently very moving. While Clarence's decline is a bit rapid - more of a plummet into full senility than a descent - it is still very well handled and ultimately leads to a very touching finale.

In his fifty,or so years since he had an uncredited role in a now long forgotten British film,Michael Caine has made a name for himself in British cinema. 'Is There Anybody There' will certainly cement his reputation that much further. Granted,he has acted in his share of stinkers, but the good/superb films out weighs them. For this outing, Caine is Clarence,a retired Magician who has just moved into a nursing home,on England's seacoast sometime in the later half of the 1980's. A 10 year old boy,who is obsessed with death & ghosts has a bad introduction with Clarence,who comes off as the typical grouchy old man who just wants to be left alone. Over a period of time,the boy learns some valuable life lessons about age. Do the two of them bond a friendship? What I admired about this film that it doesn't paint the elderly as something to be pitied or feared. The film is rounded out by a cast of mostly unknown British actors (at least by me,anyway,but it didn't diminish the film one bit). A screenplay that equally mixes humour,drama & pathos makes for a sparkling cocktail of a film that will have the viewer exiting the cinema feeling good. Rated PG-13 by the MPAA,this film contains some salty language,adult situations & a horrific (but darkly humorous)image of a magic trick gone horribly wrong.

Tracing a story between an old man and boy should induce narcolepsy. Although Caine takes the plaudits, and he is a good character actor, this works, and can only really succeed with Milner, who is very good. He is angry and confused but once he settles on the friendship with Caine he shifts and the relationship between the two opens out.

It is a bit predictable but it works with the actors, the interchange between them is critical and in this case it does as Caine and Milner react with each other, making it possible for the audience to read their relationship.

The other actors, some respected names, are not used as well as they could have been. There were other stories to tell there and its missed. The parents are fine, seen through the boy's eyes.

The setting and mood is very well evoked: all dusty and damp with the second best of everything.

Greetings again from the darkness. I will always pay to see Michael Caine act. I have always found his relaxed, natural approach to be fascinating, entertaining and mostly effective. As the Amazing Clarence, an elderly career magician, he is just fantastic. This may be the first role where he has actually gone out of his way to look older than he actually is.

When he checks himself into a home for the elderly, he befriends the young son of the owner. The boy is played by Bill Milner who was exceptional in "Son of Rambow". His mom is played by Ann-Marie Duffy and she loves her son, but just doesn't have the time and energy to devote to him (or her husband) as she dedicates herself to the tenants.

The best part of the film is watching Mr Caine and young Milner interact. Their time is magical, pun intended. The sad thing is ... this is the only part of the film that works. The rest is a bit lame and certainly not up to the standard of "Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont".

Regardless, the film is worth seeing for the performance of Michael Caine. One of his best in years and really captures the pain of getting old and slowly losing one's self.

The magician is a curious fellow; he spends his days and nights ceaselessly going over his tricks and illusions, making sure all creases and seams are hidden from view so that he may able to dispel reality, if only for a few moments. For those on the other side of the fence, the magician can be seen either as a craftsman dedicated to his art, or as something of a ray of light that hints at something else; something more than the dirt in the ground and the worms at our feet. Yet, for all the glimmers of hope and magic that the illusionist creates in the wake of his act however, there is that ever-looming cloud of certainty that plagues his own reality—standing behind the curtain, the magician is aware of the wires, the trap doors and the contraptions set up to make the mundane seem a little more fantastic; to the man with the rabbit in his hat, the world is a playground where one can briefly create an imaginary world where magic lives, but unlike those that he tricks, the magic never truly lives on once that curtain falls.

Somewhere in the audience is a young, bright-eyed boy—his name is Edward (Bill Milner) and he lives in an old-folk's home with his mother (Anne-Marie Duff) and father (David Morrissey) where death is just as common as a hot meal. Rather than believing in the Easter Bunny and Santa Clause, Edward instead has a genuine infatuation with the afterlife, making sure never to miss an episode of Arthur C. Clarke's ghost hunt programme on terrestrial TV rather than play with LEGO; that is, until one day when a new resident takes up a place beside him and switches the channel over. The new guy is a man riddled with regret and cantankerous spite, his name Clarence (Michael Caine), previous occupation—you guessed it—magician. What so inevitably starts off as a hate-hate relationship between young paranormal enthusiast Edward and old, embittered and left-in-the-rain by ghosts of the past Clarence however soon blossoms into something a little more reflective and intertwined than any of them would have imagined.

The resulting story is something we've all seen or heard before, but perhaps with enough sombre nuances to render it something a little more cinsightful and uplifting than most of these stories. There's certainly no denying that Is Anybody There, on a purely ostensible, story-wise front does nothing new at all, but through development of these two characters (and others) who are brought to life wonderfully by the cast involved, the feature overcomes its rather tepid and pedestrian plot in favour of offering a subtle but pleasant character drama. Of course, there are issues throughout the feature which undermine all the good that is done throughout (this is most prominently realised in the final act which renders one plot-line through a banal, contrived resolution that directly clashes with the central story that ends on a much more refined note), yet much of these lay in the background, easy to overlook in favour of the movie's much more engrossing and charming elements.

So while at its heart a humble and restrained piece of cinema that doesn't necessarily break any new ground, it is this simplicity and obviously intentional subtlety that makes Is Anybody There a treat rather than a bore; director John Crowley acknowledges that Peter Harness' screenplay isn't one immediately pandering for big reactions from audiences, and he plays to this sense of realism and dignity throughout without sacrificing Harness' themes on life and death that trickle throughout. Make no mistake, you certainly couldn't be blamed for missing a small portion of Is Anybody There's reflections on life, but neither should you miss the rest—instead, Crowley and Harness craft a feature that is simple in its design but larger than life in its messages and inner substance; it may not be perfect, no, but it's got enough humanity in there thanks to the cast to make it worth while, even if you think you've seen these life-affirming rites-of-passage movies before.

• A review by Jamie Robert Ward (http://www.invocus.net)