War and Destiny

The story of love lost to death during the second world war will never be tiresome for anyone whose family was touched by the war. The question is, can writers and actors still make the story real? For those of us in the audience tonight at The Screening Room in Kingston, watching Closing the Ring, the answer was a very satisfying 'yes'. Young actors were able to create the unselfconscious optimism and sense of honour of their 1940s counterparts heading off to war; the older cast members knew exactly how to portray the knowledge, understanding, and forgiveness that the present-day characters had learnt from their wartime experience, and kept in with such punishing self-control. If you don't like this film, I suspect you're under thirty. I'd suggest you prepare to discover its truth, and its very fine acting, in your later age. And be thankful if you're not on the verge of great loss in your youth. But then our soldiers are fighting and dying overseas as I write; perhaps young Ethel Anns and Teddys are making promises to each other at this very moment. In that case, open yourself to the possibility that this story might be about to unfold in your own life, even as you reject its apparent unreality.

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.

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.

The film opens in 1991, with the funeral of a former World War II veteran. The man's daughter Marie (Neve Campbell) delivers the eulogy to a church full of veterans who knew and loved her father, while her mother Ethel Ann (Shirley MacLaine) is sitting out on the church porch, smoking and nursing a hangover. When Ethel Ann begins acting strangely, only her friend Jack (Christopher Plummer) seems to understand why. It quickly emerges that there is a lot Marie does not know about her mother's past and the true story of her love life.

The movie flips to a time when this mother was young, lively, and optimistic (young Ethel Ann played by Mischa Barton). She is in love with a young farmer, Teddy Gordon (played by Canadian new comer Stephen Amell), who goes off to war with his best friends Jack (Gregory Smith) and Chuck (David Alpay), but not all of them make it back alive. The plot lines intertwine with the story of a young Ulsterman in Belfast who finds a ring in the wreckage of a crashed B-17 and is determined to return it to the woman who once owned it.

Closing the Ring got a lot of mixed reviews when it came out in England in Early 2008. But as a fan of a lot of the actors and director I wanted to see the film (usually not into Romance movies), and tried to keep up with updates on the a films release in Canada. Luckily for me while I was in Toronto, this film was released in theaters with little promotion beforehand, with the expect ion of ET playing a 30 second clip. I decided it was fate for me to see this movie, as it was the only place in Canada where it was playing.

I went with my family and we all enjoyed it. The film did have flaws, a sub plot involving the IRA confused the already busy plot, and Stephaen Arnell who played the gorgeous Mischa Barton's love interest gave a WEAK performance. Usually when an actor gives a bad performance it can ruin a movie, especially with a role as important as his, and surprisingly Barton is able to still act off of him.

Shirley MacClaine, Christopher Plummer, and Neve Campbell all work well of each other in their scenes. While scene stealer's Academy Award Winner Brenda Fricker and unknown actor Martin McCann light up the screen when they were on. Pete Postlethwaite was also very good as the grumpy Irishman Quinlan, but just like the IRA plot, scenes with the young version of him were unesscsesary. Gregory Smith is good and David Alphy does what he can with his nothing role. But the heart of the film is really Mischa Barton. SHe is just adorable, and as a fan of her earlier films (she was also stiff in her TV work), it was nice see her give a great performance, because people have labeled her a bad actress just because of "The OC" and it is too bad the film didn't get a wider release because this is her breakout role, she is wonderful.

All in all, a light film with nice performances and a great score. Great for older and younger audiences. Why did it not get a wide release!?

Never make promises you can't fulfill, otherwise you'll find that nagging feeling coming back to haunt you, and it can be quite uncomfortable, unless of course it doesn't bother you as far as integrity and trustworthiness are concerned. Then again there's the living a lie, of not being true to yourself, which sometimes can be tricky when it deals with affairs of the heart, where ignorance may be bliss.

Closing the Ring throws its hat into the WWII era inspired romance stories, where boys turn into men, and have to leave their lady love behind at home while they ship off to the warfront. With events that unfold across two different continents, and unfolding between two different timelines with the necessary flash backs, flash forwards, and nicely edited transitions, the movie isn't that bad although the story might be at times clichéd.

Jack (Gregory Smith), Chuck (David Alpay) and Teddy (Stephen Amell) are three buddies who join the air force, and are training to be pilots, navigators and gunners, whatever it takes to bring them to the skies. Mischa Barton stars as young Ethel Ann who's the flower amongst the group, but only having romantic feelings for Teddy, whom she married in secret before the trio got shipped away to join the war.

That's the arc of the past, where we see how their relationship with one another hold up during mankind's darkest hour. The arc of the present has Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer take up the senior roles of Ethel Ann and Jack respectively, and on the other side of the continent in Northern Ireland, we follow Michael Quinlan (Pete Postlethwaite) and Jimmy Reilly (Martin McCann), where the latter is a simple minded teen helping the former fireman dig around Black Mountain in search of something of value.

I guess by now you can piece together a little bit of what could possibly happen, and added to the fray is the IRA's struggle for independence in 1991. Characters interact by crossing continents, mysteries and confirmation of what happened during those faithful and pivotal moments in WWII get revealed and explained, and feelings slowly get revealed, demolishing some long held denial and unawareness. Although given what would transpire, you wonder if it's remotely possible to pine for someone for so long, or to lock away your heart so cruelly that you shut off affections even for your own child.

It's still an enjoyable movie, though not exactly a great one but it does get to its point quickly. You might find yourself being a step ahead of the characters and piece together all the information provided way in advance, but still, if you'd enjoyed movies like Atonement and Evening, then you wouldn't find this that bad at all. Oh, and the English subtitles did help in deciphering some thick Irish accent.