Mr. Morgan's Last Love

Matthew (Michael Caine) is a widower in Paris... has lived there for years, but has never learned the language. Disgraceful. Now he must start to get out and about and meet the people. He keeps bumping into dance instructor Pauline (Clémence Poésy). They seem to hit it off on some level, and they spend time together, at least for the time being. Matthew keeps trying to knock himself off, but we're not sure why. His son Miles ( Justin Kirk) and daughter (Gillian Anderson !!) show up, and they aren't sure what to make of Dad's friendship with Pauline. Family dynamics. Miles thinks he knows what's best for Dad and butts heads with both Matthew and Pauline. Lots of family conflict. Good stuff. Directed by Sandra Nettelbeck, who has written and directed several projects. Story by Françoise Dorner, une actress/directeur françoise. Moves kind of slow and bleak, for the last part of the story, but it is what it is. Interesting study of family relationships. Showing on netflix. No car chases, no gunfights. Michael Caine is good stuff.

it's an unpretentious fine film, which can be seen with pleasure.

Interpreters are beautiful and the dialogues are very pleasant.

As it is usual, authors have some difficult in finding an end for the movie, being possible a few of them. Probably due to this, the last half hour is a bit inconsistent: Pauline redirects her love from father to son a bit too quickly.

Also illogical is that people go from Paris to St. Malo and vice versa as if it was the next town in the map, or as if they had taken helicopters instead of driving or taking a taxi.

Michael Caine exhibits his 80 years splendidly. I am astonished seeing that he will act at least in three films this year.

What starts as a very intelligent, well-acted movie about the nature of relationships and the need for connection, turns dramatically and disappointingly into a sentimental mushpile of a soap opera, and then gets worse. Extremely well-acted up to a point, the characters are fleshed out as real people and you can for the most part understand and empathize with them. Michael Caine's weird attempt at an American accent doesn't quite undermine his characterization of the professor, but it is distracting and sounds too false. He did a pretty OK American accent in Cider House Rules, but nowhere else.

I was very impressed by most of this movie, including the pretty scenery, and the nicely conceived and rounded characters. About 2/3 of the way through however, it goes off the rails. Another reviewer described this movie as having sincerity, and I would agree with that up to a point. There are few false notes in the script, but when they happen they are real clunkers that drag the movie down like an anchor. This may be because the rest of the movie is so sincere and real that the false notes feel just that more false, but I don't think that's quite it.

There is a very soap opera moment at around the 3/4 point which not only feels contrived, but which pulls the story in a really unsatisfying direction. While it's headed in this disastrous direction it's actually succeeding in giving the characters life in a meaningful and sincere way, but then another ridiculous plot device drives it further into the ground. And then another. And another.

And the ending is just stupid. Unwatchably preposterously stupid. Given what we know these characters have gone through, and how much they've grown as human beings, it's outside the realm of believability and is antithetical to the story, erasing the purpose of the movie and voiding its intelligence with a single swipe. Worse, the movie wants you to view the ending as having the sort of lofty nobility that would cause you to leap out of your seat and applaud, which I find personally disgusting. Would that I had leaped out of my seat earlier and left. If that particular ending was in the original source material, then so much the worse for the source material because as portrayed it didn't do the movie any favors.

Last Love (2013)

This is such a poignant and well meant movie it's hard to not like it and its intentions. What it fails to do is "rise above." It is a heartfelt look at finding meaning at the end—and the beginning—of life in Paris, and yet it remains somewhat prosaic, missing a beat now and then. I loved it at times, but only very much liked it by the end.

I love without reservation "Mostly Martha," the most successful movie by the director, Sandra Nettlebeck. In that one, she makes her understanding of being German, and its limitations, an important part of the movie. Here we are in France, in a plot based on a French novel, with a British actor playing an American and a young French woman. Michael Caine is nor ordinary actor and he's actually wonderful here. And indeed the young woman who plays his muse, in a way (the woman who creates the "crack" in his world that is the key to the movie), is also very good, if common (played by Clemence Poesy—she appears in a couple Harry Potter movies).

What succeeds beyond these very good performances is the idea of a man near his last days in Paris, after the death of his wife, and a young woman who befriends him out of some unexplained loneliness. What they form is an odd but believable friendship. Their family and other friends do not understand or approve, but it makes sense to them, even when it's awkward. It's a kind of brave and interesting subject.

What it lacks is exactly the right feel and touch, the sense of trueness to spirit and character that people might actually have. There are moments that are just great, a rebellion or a quiet look, and then there are moments where the characters act, well, out of character. A hair.

If this seems like picking on nuances you have to understand that the movie is about such emotional and psychological nuances. It sets its own bar high, and so suffers from that. Sometimes.

See it? Yes. I liked it wholly. But see also "Mostly Martha" for a similar sense of finding what matters, of pan-European feelings, of crossing normal boundaries with romantic flair.

"Sometimes you meet someone that requires all the love you have to give." Matthew Morgan (Caine) has just lost his wife and his world no longer makes sense. Living in Paris and unable to speak the language he only has one friend left. On a train one day he meets Pauline (Poésy) and strikes up an instant friendship. After Matthew tries something drastic his two estranged children show up and old tensions come back. This is a hard movie to describe. It's not boring but not much happens. It's slow moving but keeps you interested. Michael Caine is great in this and this is not so much a love story but more of a redemption story. I am finding it hard to come up with something to say about this not because I didn't like it but because of the subject. This is really just another widow father and estranged children movie but this feels like so much more. This is a movie where you just have to see it to see what I mean. I recommend this. Overall, a cookie cutter plot but anything but a cookie cutter movie. I give it a B+.