CLOSING THE RING
Director: Richard Attenborough Stars: Shirley MacLaine, Christopher Plummer, Mischa Barton, Stephen Amell, Neve Campbell, Pete Postlethwaite, Brenda Fricker, Gregory Smith, David Alpay, Martin McCann
Reviewed by PETER MALONE
With director Richard Attenborough at 83, we are not expecting an avant garde film. No, this is old-fashioned film-making which appeals to older audiences and those with a romantic vein. It boasts a good cast, a chance to see Shirley MacLaine in her early 70s doing her acerbic thing and Christopher Plummer, nearer to 80, exerting his charm.
Actually, the plot is quite complicated. There are two time eras, the 1940s and the 1990s and there are two place settings, the Michigan and Belfast. The film moves from place to place, time to time with plenty of flashbacks. It is a bit like the cyclic indication of the title. We move around the ring and finally it is closed.
In the 1940s, three young men are great friends, enlist together after Pearl Harbour, train together and go on flying missions to Europe. At the centre of this circle is Ethel Ann (Mischa Barton) who loves one of the three, promising to love him forever. Caring for Ethel Ann, he asks one of his friends to look after her if anything should happen to him. This leads to some complications after the war and its effect on the older Ethel Ann (Shirley MacLaine).
In the meantime in Belfast, people have to shelter from raids. The IRA is active and the British troops watchful. Then the good-time Americans come.
In the 1990s, the young Belfast fireman from the 1940s (Pete Postlethwaite) continues to dig on the mountainside at the edge of the city, helped by an exuberant young man (Martin McCann) who finds Ethel Ann’s ring. As might be imagined, this opens up all the memories, probes into the secrets, especially for the only surviving pilot friend (Christopher Plummer) and Ethel Ann’s daughter, Marie (Neve Campbell). A vist to Belfast and an experience of terrorist bombs lead to some resolution of the events which have bedeviled the characters for almost fifty years.
Despite the time and place shifts, this is plain and classic storytelling. Definitely not for those with Tarantino sensibilities. An entertainment and some emotions for those who like the old-style films.
Reviewed by MARCUS SINCLAIR
Richard Attenborough takes a step backward in time and style with his latest film, Closing The Ring. It is a pastiche of the women’s weepies of the Forties and Fifties, but when compared with the masters of this genre, Douglas Sirk and John Stahl, he has a lot to learn. It displays a naivety of subject matter and style that is a shock coming from such an experienced and well-respected contemporary film-maker.
Set in America and Northern Ireland, years after World War II, it hints, more often than tells, of the miserable life led by a woman, Shirley MacLaine/Mischa Barton who marries the wrong man, David Alpay, and has a child to him when her “husband”, Stephen Amell, is killed in a plane crash in the closing period of the war. Tragedy becomes soapy melodrama in Attenborough’s hands as the man who really loved her, Christopher Plummer, hovers around, looking and yearning, throughout the years. Told in flashback and scene changes from America to Ireland, where the Brits have their hands full fighting the IRA, the young players are no match for the old. The acting styles are uneven, even amateurish, and it is only Mischa Barton who manages to hold her own. I, even, found her to be far more convincing than MacLaine who just seems to be coasting through her role. Her hammy scenes at her husband’s funeral, and her grieving over the corpse of the British soldier in the Irish town are deplorable, as is the coy behaviour she displays at film’s end.
Much of the background material is roughly sketched in. We never see Mischa’s parents and are only told that they are not happy with the choice of boy-friend she has made. Nor do we know why. Is it because he comes from a rural background and the others are from the town and have well known respected parents? Or is it wealth or lack of? The marriage ceremony, the building of the house, her visits there, all have an air of unreality about them as do the recruiting and going away/ on leave episodes.
In its favour the film looks good, and some of the scenes in Ireland: the hunting of the IRA “mastermind”, the interrogation of Gregory Smith by the authorities, the street bomb all pack a wallop. Christopher Plummer and Pete Postlethwaite bring their characters to life as does Brenda Fricker, the once Irish tart who fired the imagination of many a young lad, and set the tongues of the “old dears” wagging. But for the rest all we can hope for that next time around Sir Richard will return to form.