Movie: 45 Years

I have recently discovered the joys of Miserly Monday or whatever you call the cut-price day at the Nova Cinema in Carlton, along with the many other recently-retired baby boomers I’ve observed there over this past six months.  I certainly felt as if I was in musty company with this film, which is obviously aimed at an older audience; a cohort which no doubt will grow larger with the numerical bulge of retirees filling in their days at the cinema.  Is that a bad thing? No, says my Lunchtime Companion, but I’m not so sure. I don’t know if I like being demographically pegged and marketed to quite so blatantly.

Retired couple Kate and Geoff live a very quiet life in rural Norfolk, and the action takes place over the days preceding their 45th wedding anniversary celebration party, which had been postponed on account of Geoff’s illness five years earlier.  Theirs is a routinized, comfortable, intellectual,  quiet (I can’t emphasize how quiet!) relationship, with Geoff diminished because of illness and age. However, when news arrives from the past, Kate finds herself judging their time together with an unforgiving severity.

The film is based on a short story and I can imagine that it would work very well in a more compressed format.  As it is, though, I don’t think that it sustained a ninety minute film which both actors- consummate and brilliant as they are- could have captured in a shorter film.( In fact, I’m surprised that it was only 90 minutes because it felt longer) The scenery while glorious, became rather laboured with such blatant pathetic fallacy treatment.  That said, though, the acting was first-rate and the emotional rendering subtle and adult. Just perhaps a bit too adult!