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Digging up the past

By Philip French
THE OBSERVER, LONDON
Friday, Mar 28, 2008, Page 16

Mischa Barton, left, and Gregory Smith provide the back story in Richard Attenborough's latest World War II-related film. PHOTO: COURTESY OF SWALLOW WINGS

Richard Attenborough made his movie debut as a naval rating in Noel Coward's wartime morale-booster In Which We Serve, served in the RAF himself as a gunner cameraman and like many of his generation has lived his life in the shadow of World War II. In the 60-odd years since his demobilization he's appeared in numerous war movies, most famously perhaps in The Great Escape, and beginning with Oh! What a Lovely War has directed a succession of pictures with wartime settings. So it's not surprising that he was attracted to Closing the Ring, the first script by playwright and TV writer Peter Woodward in which events in the present are connected to those in World War Two, and septuagenarians in Ireland and America look back to the war and reveal their experiences to a younger generation.

The movie begins by cutting between two settings on either side of the Atlantic in 1991. In Branagan, Michigan, there is a funeral of a wartime US Air Corps flyer attended by former comrades, though his elderly widow (Shirley MacLaine) seems oddly detached from the event. (The town's name is possibly a private joke about Brannigan, the thriller about Anglo-American relations in which Attenborough co-starred with John Wayne.) Meanwhile, on a steep hill outside Belfast a man in his sixties (Pete Postlethwaite) is excavating the site where a US bomber crashed in 1944. The movie is about digging up the past both literally and figuratively, about coming to terms with life, and the need to honor the promises we make. Eventually through a complex series of flashbacks the connection between these opening events is revealed, and the film reaches an emotionally and physically explosive climax in the streets of troubled Belfast.

Film Notes Closing the Ring DIRECTED BY: Richard Attenborough STARRING: Shirley MacLaine (Ethel Ann), Christopher Plummer (Jack), Mischa Barton (Young Ethel Ann), Gregory Smith (Young Jack), Stephen Amell (Teddy Gordon), Brenda Fricker (Grandma Reilly), Martin McCann (Jimmy Reilly), Pete Postlethwaite (Michael Quinlan) RUNNING TIME: 119 MINUTES TAIWAN RELEASE: TODAY

Woodward's script is more than a little contrived as well as over-emphatic. But Attenborough has infused it with warmth and mature insight, and older members of the audience are likely to find it extremely moving. He also handles a large cast of young and older actors with his customary skill and sympathy, and there is a particularly fine performance from Christopher Plummer as a former American bomber pilot who has carried with him all his life an undeclared love for his best friend's wife.

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