Last Orders; Hart's War
The World War II buddies in Last Orders are old men, and they spend quite a bit of time in bars, tossing back pints, trying not to talk about the old days and then giving in. They were soldiers once, and young; they helped free the world, then they came back home and remade England. You'd never know it from looking at them.
This relevant paradox is the heart of writer/ director Fred Schepisi's Last Orders, a big screen version of Graham Swift's Booker Prize-winning novel about the intersecting lives of World War II vets in Southeast London. It insists on the uniqueness, the complexity, the heroism of flawed and ordinary people. On paper, the plot sounds uneventful: local butcher shop owner and World War II hero Jack Dodds (Michael Caine) dies. As his son Vince (Ray Winstone) and his three best pals (Bob Hoskins, Tom Courtenay and David Hemmings) drive him to the sea to scatter his ashes, they remember Jack's life, and the lives of Jack's wife Amy (Helen Mirren) and the Dodds' two children, all of which intersected with their own lives.
The dramatic predicaments are mundane, and very Contemporary English Lit: Jack held onto the butcher shop long past the point of financial viability, creating debts he hoped to erase by giving his best friend Ray (Hoskins) a fat wad of cash to lay down at the track. Another friend, Vic (Courtenay), owns the funeral home that cremated Jack (the oddity of this isn't lost on Vic, but he doesn't obsess over it, either). The fourth friend, Lenny (Hemmings), is a tenderhearted but impulsive ex-boxer who can't stop fighting the world.
We feel we've known all these people for years within minutes of meeting them. A 1980 Pauline Kael observation about Schepisi still applies: "Schepisi has a gift for individualizing every one of the people on the screen; it takes him only a few licks to let us perceive how they justify themselves to themselves." The film looks terrific, with dense, realistic production design, evocative but unpretty widescreen photography, and some of the nimblest, funniest editing this side of a Bob Fosse film. There's a lot of sex, but it's not adolescent, it's adult. Schepisi tosses sly visual jokes like bon-bons; a flashback to the Dodds family on vacation in a borrowed butcher wagon is interrupted when mom and dad notice that their barely adolescent boy is getting a bit too handsy with their newly-adolescent, mentally challenged daughter. The boy is placed in the back of the van, and as the vehicle pulls away from us, heading back toward the highway, we see him framed within a rear window, under the painted words, "FRESH MEAT."
My two main complaints against it: at 109 minutes, it's simply too short to fully explore the richness of its characters; and it doesn't pay sufficient attention to period details and old-age makeup, resulting in moments where you're not sure how old the characters are supposed to be. But those are rather minor quibbles compared to what Schepisi's accomplished. The performances are superb right on down the line? including the actors who portray younger versions of the main characters in flashback. As Ray, the loyal buddy to everybody who might be less happy and less decent than he appears, Hoskins gives his most complex, laid-back, lived-in leading man performance since Mona Lisa. Caine, an inveterate ham stymied by Hoskins' coiled charisma, underplays Jack, giving him a Willy Lomanesque averageness, but a leading man's sense of joie de vivre.
It's a bit of a return to form for Schepisi. The Australian filmmaker, now 62, was singled out as a potential master by Kael over two decades ago?after his first two movies, The Devil's Playground (1976) and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) opened in New York to great acclaim. He's made other notable movies, including Barbarosa (1982), Roxanne (1987), A Cry in the Dark (1988) and Six Degrees of Separation (1993). And notwithstanding a couple of 90s box office duds (including the candy-colored screwup I.Q.) Schepisi has held onto his reputation as a master commercial craftsman that keeps his head down and serves the material instead of himself. I wish there were more directors like him.
Like Schepisi's outstanding, inexplicably underrated Six Degrees?and 1999's Election, which uses some rather Schepisi-like devices?Last Orders dares to mimic the freedom of a third-person omniscient novel. But because the milieu, the performances and the tone are realistic?and because the director usually resists the temptation to call attention to his own inventiveness?I suspect the film will never get proper credit for its logistical complexity. Schepisi leaps nimbly between the present, the recent past and the distant past; the story darts in and out of characters' heads with a dexterity that would have made Virginia Woolf nod in approval. Schepisi, his cinematographer Brian Tufano and his editor Kate Williams are in such command of their craft that they pull off a couple of point-of-view shifts that are supposed to be impossible in cinema: They show one character casually glancing at another character and imagining what the other character might be thinking. Now that's confidence.
Farrell's cast as the title character, Tommy Hart, a green lieutenant from a rich family who's imprisoned in a German POW camp. Hart soon finds himself involved in a court-martial of a black American airman named Lincoln Scott (a characteristically hard, unsentimental and empathetic performance by young character actor Terrence Howard), who is accused of a heinous crime against a white officer. Bruce Willis is the hardass Colonel who manipulates Hart into representing the airman, then seems to undermine him at every turn, for reasons he stubbornly refuses to disclose.
Hart's War says that within the righteous moral framework of our involvement in World War II, America's ongoing civil war about race continued; black Americans (even gifted Tuskegee airmen like Scott) were treated as second-class citizens during what was supposed to be a crusade against tyranny in all its forms. It's a good point, well worth making, and for this reason I enjoyed Hart's War more than I thought I would (though I still wouldn't recommend it to anybody looking for a great drama, much less an action picture?the resolution's too pat, and too many sections drag and drift). I liked the freshness of the court martial story, despite its reliance on courtroom movie cliche; the subject matter is provocative and relevant. I appreciated the film's parallels between the legacy of North American slavery and the 20th-century enslavement and extermination of Jews and other undesirables by the Nazis. I truly wish Hart's War added up to more. Still, I'm reminded of a friend's comment: if a film makes you think at all, it's done its job.