Um Amor para Toda a Vida

a love story. or only a war story. in fact, both. not as two parts of a single story but as mixed sides. because its virtue is to be an old fashion story. comfortable in a specific way. seductive in each aspect. it is one of films who gives the flavor and the colors of a world. in delicate and touching manner. one of many stories about her and him, about the other, about the unexpected event and about the truth as a fragile building, after decades. and this does "Closing the Ring" more than a Hallmark film. but a sort o rediscover of personal memories about similar facts and meets and decisions.

Great filmmakers usually end their careers on a sour note and this is no exception; barring some inept future use of British lottery money it is unlikely that the knight Sir Richard (nay, call me LORD Richard) will get another 15 million pounds or so to blow again.

Pick your favorite: Henry Hathaway bowed out with SUPER DUDE (a blaxploitation film I had the privilege of viewing in Cleveland on a double bill at the Scrumpy Dump Theater (!) some 35 years ago; Billy Wilder ended with BUDDY BUDDY; William Wyler had THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES (on paper a step up from SUPER DUDE, but not by all that much); Frank Capra with POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES which he really hated, per his autobiography; Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (hardly up to his high standards); Otto Preminger had THE HUMAN FACTOR, which I (alone?) liked (I've been a rabid Nicol Williamson fan since seeing him at Stratford as one of the greatest Macbeths, opposite Helen Mirren) and which costarred Attenborough. Even Michael Powell, apart from a look-back docu, culminated his career with an innocuous but hardly impressive Children's Film Foundation effort THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW, which I watched once at MoMA for completeness. There are obvious exceptions: Joe Mankiewicz bowed out with SLEUTH, an estimable movie and David Lean's A PASSAGE TO India was a winner.

Per the particularly self-serving (and useless) "making of" featurette on the DVD release titled "Love, Loss & Life", CLOSING THE RING is the folly of several producers who fell in love with a first-timer's screenplay based on the actual finding of an old wedding ring in the Irish hills. The flimsy, yet convoluted, script got funding and, per the interviews, bowled over Attenborough, too. How audience members react, limited to video fans in the U.S. where the Weinsteins thought better of wasting money on a theatrical release, is an individual matter, but the tired blood on screen here is frankly an embarrassment.

Some cinematic lions, notably Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer, as well as from a more recent generation Brenda Fricker and Pete Postlethwaite, are matched against some young talent, but the performances are uniformly poor. Having seen all of Attenborough's theatrical releases in first-run I concede he is capable of very good (Gandhi) but when he is bad, he turns out execrable material, notably the insulting A CHORUS LINE adaptation. I enjoyed YOUNG WINSTON, but then again I liked NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA by Schaffner back then too -pageantry is easy to take. But when Richard tried a genre film MAGIC for Joseph E. Levine, after making A BRIDGE TOO FAR for that once-famous showman, mediocrity ruled -about 10 steps below no-budget maestro Lindsay Shonteff's DEVIL DOLL.

Despite the filmmakers' protests of how moving and inspirational this love story hit them, on the screen it is flat and dull. The young cast, led by Mischa Barton, gives paper-thin performances, and the attempt by Attenborough "to be hip" by having Barton nude a couple of times is beneath contempt. That's as old a ploy as THE YELLOW TEDDY BEARS, a well-meaning (and boring) British exploitation film from 1964 for which I saw a vintage U.S. coming attraction just this past weekend (resuscitated by Something Weird Video) in which extraneous nude scenes were added to release it stateside as GUTTER GIRLS. Now I might accuse the Weinsteins of such ploys, but for Richard to stoop that low -wow!

The back and forth plotting from 1941 (actually 1944 it turns out in the narrative later) and 1991 to shoehorn in the Irish Troubles is undigested screen writing of the worst order. Connections between the two are lame and all the "maybe" and suggestive material goes nowhere. For example, strident Neve Campbell (a performance worse even than her terrible effort in the Alan Rudolph dud about sex INTIMATE AFFAIRS) as Shirley's grown up daughter creates wonderment as to "who's her daddy" but it turns out to be strictly a red herring, time-wise. Ditto casting Fricker of all people as the old-age version of a W.W. II "tart" who slept with all the Yanks -this hook is dangled for the viewer and left unresolved. Postlethwaite is perhaps the best performer in this one, but his role is 100% functional, designed for a big "reveal" only.

I've never seen MacLaine so disinterested (and uninteresting) in a movie- she looks like she's playing under protest. The character of a woman who had basically three beaux but wasted her life attached to the dead one is admittedly unplayable but she doesn't even try. Plummer has more energy, perhaps he alone was given Geritol on the set, but this is a thankless assignment as the "good buddy" who never got the girl. The debuting young Irish thesp Martin McCann is insufferably cheery in what turns out to be the lead role, the boy who found "the ring". Closeups and other emphasis on the object make one think we are living in the shadow of Tolkien, but needless to say this totem is of zero importance.

CLOSING THE RING is so bad one is reminded of the late Frank Perry's disastrously soapy MOMMIE DEAREST and MONSIGNOR, for which a wonderful director ended up being the butt of catcalls from Midnight Movie audiences. Unfortunately, its plotting is too dull and execution too mediocre for this lame RING to end up with any such afterlife, avoiding even the pitiful fate of having Hedda Lettuce lead camp followers in weekly derision at my local Chelsea (NY division, not England) cinema.

First of all, this didn't deserve the straight to DVD treatment it received for the U.S. It's not perfect by any means, but it's an experience that should have been seen on the big screen. No, it's not action packed, but it's beautiful to watch. It's a romance with dimensions that work very well, and oddly enough I wasn't one step ahead of it the whole way through. Some elements are always a bit predictable for a film like this, but I wasn't always entirely sure where it was heading next. This could have gotten a solid score of 10 had it not been for several severe flaws. The biggest of which is the actor playing Teddy. Now imagine The Notebook if Ryan Gosling was an awful actor, it would have destroyed the movie. Luckily, as important as the Teddy character is, he's not in a massive part of the film, and it's easy to imagine what the character should have been, and believe the key romance behind the film. Mischa worked for me for the most part, although she had a majority of her scenes with the lifeless Teddy character. McClain and Plummer were amazing as they usually always are. Campbell did a believable effort as the daughter lost behind all the secrets, and I loved the actors who played the young friends of Teddy. Lastly, in the end we are treated with one of the most beautiful film songs in years. Watch the credits, you'll here the amazing Lost Without Your Love, which will complete your experience with this flawed but wonderful film.

I enjoyed this one quite a bit, set in two time zones and countries with a more than decent cast. There's mystery, a heartbreaking romance, and an exciting (yet convenient) conclusion in Ireland.

The story flips fairly seamlessly between 1991 and 1943, starting with the passing of World War II veteran Chuck Harris. His wife (Shirley MacLaine) refuses to grieve, numbing herself with alcohol and lashing out at her daughter (Neve Campbell) and lifelong friend (Christopher Plummer).

Through a series of flashbacks where Shirley becomes (Mischa Barton), we learn that Chuck wasn't her first love and that her heart belonged to Teddy (Stephen Amell) who never returned from WW2. We also see Belfast in 1991 where (Pete Postlethwaite) - love him and young Jimmy are digging on a mountainside finding bits of pieces from a downed B-17 bomber, eventually they discover a ring inscribed from Teddy to Ethel and after tracking down its history a mystery nearly five decades in the making slowly comes into focus.

The story is very good story but a bit all over the place where the characters emotions are concerned, which are over the top at times and mean without reason. Shirley is especially nasty to her daughter but even Plummer has his moments.

The acting was fantastic though, the flashbacks well done, I was surprised to see Stephen Amell's 'Arrow' in an early role. The story in Ireland was more involved than I thought it would be including gangsters and IRA bombings. I enjoyed Martin McCann as young Jimmy and the inclusion of the hawk to tie it all together. Sad. 11/8/15

I must hand it to Lord Attenborough who is attempting a chick flick to keep up with the times. Can anyone else attract the level of talent in the film: Christopher Plummer, Shirley Maclaine, Neve Campbell, Mischa Barton? The story has great promise. It opens with the funeral of a young woman's beloved daughter who is delivering her eulogy to a church full of veterans who knew and loved her father. Her mother, on the other hand, is sitting out on the church porch, smoking and nursing a hangover.

What develops from this story shows us a time when this mother was young, lively, and optimistic. She is in love with a young farmer who must go off to war. They always go out with two friends who are the best buds a guy could have.

The movie is also interspersed with a story that takes place in Belfast. You know that at some point, the film will have to knit these two elements together. There are numerous light moments to offset the darker experiences of love and loss during war. Ethel Ann (Maclaine)has loved well and was always loved but she is too self-involved to understand that she has used her own tragedies to punctuate her relationship with her daughter (Campbell).

Some of the younger actors in this are Canadian talent. I hope that this film gives them the exposure that they need to continue making their way up the talent ladder. David Alpay from Slings and Arrows is terrific as is Allan Hawco. I wanted to see more of them and less of Mischa Barton whose acting is wooden at the best of times.

At the Toronto Film Festival screening yesterday, the projector had a hiccup during the sow. Stephen Amell who plays Teddy got onto the stage and had an impromptu Q&A to save the day. It was fascinating to hear how he was cast and what kind of experience an actor has when they work with Richard Attenborough.