My Boy Jack

Sad, extremely well acted tale of the senselessness of war and one family's experience. The father in this story is famous but it doesn't make their struggles any less universal. Daniel Radcliffe is terrific once again showing that he will be able to have a lifelong career far removed from Harry Potter. This is really a four person story and he is matched in excellence by the other three players, David Haig, Kim Cattrall and Carey Mulligan. Kim completely moves away from her Sex and the City persona with a performance of quiet control. She's always been a versatile actress but her identification with Samantha is such that her former more varied work is often forgotten. A very moving story presented with great skill.

I basically agree with the consensus of the critics. This is another good, solid, made-for-TV production that leaves little to be desired.

Well produced, well filmed and well acted, finally a movie with a script, with intelligent, meaningful dialog. What a welcome surprise! My compliments to David Haig, not only for the aforementioned script, but also for his acting, which was nothing short of excellent. His Kipling is a real, living creature, we can see him, we can hear him, but we can also feel him, his pain is real, when he hurts, it is almost as if we do too.

If there is a flaw to this film, it is only that of not having dared to dig even deeper into the emotions of the main characters, which would undoubtedly have made it a much longer movie, but in my opinion also a better one.

I don't remember why I added this to my DVR; sometimes I go on a PBS binge and record all kinds of "edifying" material. From the little summary on the DVR screen, I expected a family-conflict drama mixed in with some heroic war scenes and rousing patriotism.

It did have rousing patriotism, family conflict, and heroic war scenes, yet it was not at all what I expected. When the film finished I could see past and future echoes of this family, of all families who send a son or daughter to war. Somewhere in America today there are parents just like Mr. and Mrs. Kipling in the film, and there have been for generations past.

This is a movie to see when your everyday grind has sapped your humanity.

I have been viewing Masterpiece Theatre for many years and I have trouble thinking of one episode that surpasses the excellence of this production.

The main actors all give great performances in this story of how Rudyard Kipling, poet laureate and a member of an important government war committee, persuaded the authorities to enlist his son Jack despite failing two health examinations because of his poor eyesight. The rest of the movie deals with the dilemma that never seemed to cross Kipling's mind: what moral responsibility would he bear if anything happened to his much-loved son?

As we see in the run-up to the declaration of war, Kipling, played by David Haig, was a fervent supporter of taking on the "Huns". In the commentary following the film, we learn that he never served his country on the battlefield. Instead, he put his expectations on his son Jack. The scenes from the Great War tell the horror of the conditions in the rat-infested trenches as soldiers coped with open wounds in the rain and the mud. Then cutaway to the Kipling home in pastoral English setting...the contrast is vivid.

Kipling's wife (Kim Cattrall) and daughter (Carey Mulligan)are extremely upset at the prospect of John "Jack" Kipling going off to war. Daniel Radcliffe performs the role of the dutiful son who also proved to be more than a capable leader of the young men in his charge. Martin McCann, who plays the soldier Bowe who saw the younger Kipling die in battle, gives an extraordinary performance when he visits the Kipling estate to tell the story of Jack's death.

A very noteworthy scene takes place at the end of the movie when Kipling visits George V, the reigning monarch, and a personal friend. In this scene, the King expresses his sympathy to Kipling and then mentions that his own son recently died. This is a reference to the youngest child of George V and Queen Mary, who was an epileptic, and died suddenly following a seizure. This event was treated quietly by the press at the time. However, whether or not this meeting happened, it is an interesting side-bar to the movie, with the King and his poet laureate sharing their grief.

I have always been interested in the story of Jack Kipling from the time I read a newspaper article about how a Canadian who worked for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission was able to locate the burial plot of Jack Kipling towards the end of the 20th century, many decades after he died. This was something the Kipling family had tried in vain to find.

For me, this movie adds an extra dimension to that story and to the ongoing cinematic treatment of a war that is now almost 100 years ago.

If the point of Brian Kirk's television film, adapted by David Haig from his stage play and starring Haig as the writer Rudyard Kipling, was to show just how much of a horse's ass Kipling actually was and just how awful it is to send young men, some merely boys, out to fight a war, any war, then it succeeded in spades. But I'm not quite sure that was the point and its screening on Remembrance Sunday was no coincidence. While we were certainly there to weep at the loss of Jack, Kipling's son, drummed into the army by his father's jingoism, as well as the hundreds of thousands of others who died in The Great War, I think we were also meant to applaud their bravery, if not their foolishness, then and now. Parallels to present conflicts are unmistakable.

Of its kind, of course, it's well enough made. England was a green and pleasant land, certainly on Kipling's estate. Unfortunately it was also a bit like Neverland with Kipling coming over as a cross between J M Barrie and Gandolf. And the trenches weren't much better. The rain and the mud had a sanitized look about them. We never really got away from the studio and I always think that sort of thing looks better in black and white.

What finally distinguishes it are the two central performances. Haig makes Kipling a splendidly priggish boor proving he is a much better actor than he is a writer. As his sacrificial son, Jack, that sprogget Daniel Radcliffe, (he isn't very tall, is he?), finally shook off the mantle of Harry Potter with a marvelously nuanced study of a boy forced into manhood before his time. (Radcliffe turned eighteen during filming just as his character turned eighteen prior to his death). It was a touching, exploratory piece of acting that seemed to me to be as much about Radcliffe as it was about Jack. Both players add a dimension to the drama that it lacked elsewhere and if it finally moved me, and it did, it was due to their performances. In every other respect it's just a typical made-for-television costume drama.