Closing the Ring
12A, Nationwide
It would be good to be able to think of something nice to say about this movie, if only out of respect and affection for Richard Attenborough, who directed it, but what? Nope, it’s just not possible. This so badly stinks. It is just so, so awful. After the screening I attended, the press were most generously invited to enjoy a glass of champagne with Lord Attenborough at a venue around the corner, but I could not go. Usually, I’m spectacularly up for a free glass of champagne. Ask anybody. But what if I were asked what I thought, and I could not think of anything nice to say, just as I still can’t now? It would be so embarrassing, although probably not as embarrassing as this film in which, on top of everything else, credulity is stretched so far it twangs back into your face. It twanged back into mine several times — ouch! — which was annoying, as I kept hoping to kill at least some of the two hours with a good, old-fashioned doze.
The film opens in Michigan, in 1991, with Ethel Ann (Shirley MacLaine in the most hilariously youthful wig) attending the funeral of her husband Chuck. She does not appear especially bereaved or upset, but then if you had a husband called ‘Chuck’, would you be? When Ethel Ann then begins acting strangely, only her friend Jack (Christopher Plummer) seems to understand why. It quickly emerges that there is a lot Ethel Ann’s daughter Marie (Neve Campbell) does not know about her mother’s past and the true story of her love life. Much of the story is told via flashbacks to the 1940s when Ethel Ann (now played by Mischa Barton) was young and beautiful, had hair that appeared to be her own, and was in love with a young farmer, Teddy (played by Canadian newcomer Stephen Amell as a sort of Robert Redford Lite; Very, Very Lite). There is one semi-nude sex scene which doesn’t add much to the story and is almost unbearably stiff — in the unintended sense — but does mean Ms Barton gets them out for the boys, which is nice. For the boys.
Anyway, right to the schmaltz fest at the end, Closing the Ring heaps melodrama on to melodrama via melodrama. I’ve never felt so melodrama-ed in my life. Teddy goes off to war with his best friends Jack and Chuck, who are also in love with Ethel Ann, and doesn’t make it back. Meanwhile, in present time, on a hillside in Belfast, an old fella called Michael Quinlan (Pete Postlethwaite) and a young lad called Jimmy (Martin McCann) find a ring inscribed with ’Ethel Ann’ and ‘Teddy’ in the wreckage of a crashed B-17 and are determined to return it to the woman who once owned it. With regards to credulity, at one point Ethel, Jack, Jimmy and Michael all wind up on the same Northern Irish street between two IRA bomb attacks so that Michael can at last reveal a decades-old secret. Now, what are the chances of that?
This is meant, I imagine, to be a good old-fashioned ‘love spanning the decades’ weepie, but, as it’s impossible to believe even one man might have ever been in love with Ethel Ann, let alone three, it has nothing at its heart. As a young woman, Ethel is beautiful and wears the most heavenly dresses (there, I thought of something nice to say) but is entirely vapid, as is Teddy. As the older woman, she is miserable and selfish, nasty to her daughter and so self-obsessed that what she needs isn’t so much the return of the ring to aid her ‘grieving’ but a good shake and for someone to shout at her, ‘Just get over it, love.’ MacLaine performs without even a whiff of sympathy. Christopher Plummer? He not only has to say some of the worst lines imaginable — ‘talk to her or you will lose her’ — but also overemotes to the extent that you don’t know quite know where to look. There is a scene in a bar where he is meant to break down and so break our hearts, but you know what? Everyone in the audience laughed. How awful is that? Awful, awful, that’s what it is. There is no way I could have gone for that champagne.
What was Dicky thinking of? Everything is a cliché, including the direction, where scenes are dark during dark times and sunny during sunnier times. The best thing in this, by far, is Brenda Fricker, who plays a wartime tart turned grandmother, but she isn’t in it nearly enough. I feel bad about saying all this, because of Attenborough and everything, but I did quite like Gandhi. Is free champagne still on the go for that?
I am an idiot. Last month, in this space, I proffered the usual random selection of favourite albums of the year, not a single one of which had actually been released in 2007, for, like many people (I’d like to think), I can be a little slow on the musical uptake. A day or two after the column had been filed, I was listening to Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch) for maybe the 78th time when I suddenly thought, ‘Hang on, this came out this year. And it’s as good as anything I’ve heard this year as well.’ Thus proving that I am appreciably slower on a far wider range of uptakes than I had previously suspected.
To be fair, though, Wilco’s album could be an easy one to disregard. The band, led by singer and songwriter Jeff Tweedy, are a cornerstone of the American alt-rock scene and have released a number of jagged, even tortured albums over the years, combining country-rock with misery and mild psychological problems, with increasing commercial success. They have never done it for me, particularly; I’ve had a go, usually following up the recommendations of friends, but after listening to a Wilco album my first instinct has often been to send them an email saying, ‘Have you thought of perhaps going for a walk? Or having a nice long bath? You really will feel much better.’ And to anyone who felt miserable after listening to it, my recommendation would have been: try not listening to it again.
But the strangest things happen in music, as in life, and what no one could have predicted is that Jeff Tweedy has cheered up. Apparently he is married and has children and has given up smoking and may even have kicked the painkiller addiction generated by chronic migraines, and let’s not forget the panic attacks or the major depressive disorder, because he won’t have. But whatever the reasons, life is currently good for Jeff Tweedy, and this has been reflected in the music. Accordingly Bob Harris played a track from the new album on his Radio Two country show in the summer, a wonderful, sunny little tune called ‘Either Way’. Then he played it again the following week and the week after that, never talking it up, which is unusual for him, but then he obviously liked it so much he felt it wasn’t necessary. Harris’s show was actually the perfect place for the song, which is infused with the sound of late-1960s/early-1970s California before the Eagles discovered cocaine and ruined everything. It’s an amazingly joyous record, with a lovely soaring guitar solo, and unlike anything I’d heard from Wilco before.
Some of their fans, needless to say, were furious. I think we know how they feel. There’s a band you love, possibly because they are even more miserable than you, and their lead singer sits at home recording entire albums by himself on Pro Tools, including a 15-minute thing with electronic noises you don’t actually like, because it’s not there to be liked, but you can see why he would want to record it, what with his migraines and everything. Then, three years later, an album comes out that has clearly been recorded by a full band playing together in a room. And there are tunes and soaring guitar solos and the whole thing could easily have been made in 1973. One or two critics called it ‘Dad rock’, a brutal term which, I have to admit, I have used myself for music I didn’t like. But that’s not the real problem they have with Sky Blue Sky. The real p roblem they have is Tweedy’s obvious contentment. Rock music embraces all the grand, operatic emotions, but it still struggles with the domestic ones. And Tweedy’s album challenges the old saw that you have to be miserable to produce great art. Dare we suggest that some people might do their best work after they have ironed out some of their personal problems? Or did Kurt Cobain die for nothing? Well, now you come to mention it, yes he did. If only for this reason (but also for the tunes), Sky Blue Sky is, on second thoughts, my album of the year.
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