"Last Orders"

Michael Caine heads a dream cast of veteran English actors in Fred Schepisi's unassuming masterpiece about life, love and the cruel joke of old age.

By Charles Taylor

Feb 15, 2002 | The indignities of aging are a tragedy when it comes to women, as Tennessee Williams knew, and a comedy when it comes to men, as Samuel Beckett knew. Fred Schepisi knows that too. His film of Graham Swift's lovely novel "Last Orders," the story of four men taking the ashes of a friend to their final resting place, is funny in the way that makes you ache with sadness (the way Chekhov is funny), profound without ever being self-important, warm without ever succumbing to sentimentality.

This film about the grand joke of old age, the joke life plays on all of us, is, I think, an unassuming masterpiece. It's one of those miracles of filmmaking where every element -- the direction, Brian Tufano's photography, Kate Williams' brilliant editing -- is in sync with every other element, and work together to serve the material. Schepisi leads his cast -- Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren and Ray Winstone -- to the most harmonious and seamless piece of ensemble acting the movies have seen since Louis Malle's "Vanya on 42nd Street." They make us believe that these people have spent their lives together, that they know each other's jokes, each other's limitations, each other's secrets, and that they respect each other's illusions.

The cast exudes a palpable pleasure in working together, the ease of pros acting with other pros (Ray Winstone, its youngest member, exudes delight in working with the generation of British actors he must have looked up to as a novice). The intuitive rapport between these actors is so certain and strong that, like a great piece of music, it can support solos without breaking the flow of the whole.

There's a way that, for good actors, words are a last resort. Even when you've got great words to speak, you've got to be able to express the full emotion of a moment without them. In "Last Orders," each of the actors is given at least one moment to him- or herself that is a marvel of silent expression: Vince (Ray Winstone) scattering his father's ashes in a spot that holds a special meaning; Vic (Tom Courtenay) stumbling upon a secret about his friends that he is compelled to keep to himself; Amy (Helen Mirren), Jack's widow, sitting on a bus after making a painful decision to get on with her life; Lenny (David Hemmings) overcome with emotion in a pub bathroom for what his life might have been; Ray (Bob Hoskins) watching a horse race whose outcome determines whether he'll be able to keep a final promise to his best friend Jack (Michael Caine); and Jack, watching the same race, afforded only the briefest shadow of relief. None of these actors does more than stand there in these scenes, yet there's a lifetime in each of them.

The movie begins shortly after Jack has died and his friends Ray, Lenny and Vic, and his son Vince, are fulfilling his final wishes by scattering his ashes in the sea at the resort town of Margate. Cutting between their journey -- with side trips to the World War II memorial at Chatham and to Canterbury Cathedral -- and their individual memories of their earlier lives, "Last Orders" shifts smoothly between time and points of view. Schepisi proved himself adept at nonlinear narrative in his film of John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation." Working from his own adaptation of Swift's novel, Schepisi does work here that's even more assured, and he's aided by Kate Williams' cutting, effortless in its transitions between the years and, when it needs to be, suddenly abrupt, as if to signal memories that are still raw.

It's a deceptively simple method but it has a quietly overwhelming effect. Watching these characters in the present, left with their memories of their dead friend, and then seeing him alive again among them, or watching their not always happy reveries of youth (where they are played by a group of talented young actors well matched to their older counterparts, especially J.J. Field as the young Jack and David Hemmings' son Nolan as the young Lenny) the past and present exist at once, as if nothing in these characters' lives has been settled. The movie can be summed up by the advice the dying Jack gives to Ray. "If you ever get the choice," he says, "if you ever get the option, you go first. It's the carrying on that's hard. Ending -- it ain't nothing."

Next Page: The ever-sexy Helen Mirren, in what may be the role of her career

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