by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night NBC showed an entire movie — a welcome throwback
to the glory days of their Saturday Night at the Movies program in the 1960’s during which I saw some of the
Hollywood classics that are still among my all-time favorite films, including Sunset
Boulevard, Monkey Business (the sci-fi
screwball comedy from 1952 with Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe — not the 1931 Marx Brothers film, which I encountered
later), The Seven-Year Itch, The Solid Gold Cadillac and the 1960 version of H. G. Wells’ The
Time Machine (which gave me a lifelong
phobia about clocks — to this day I cannot sleep in a room with a ticking
clock: all my bedroom clocks have to be electric and silent). Just what quirk of network scheduling led to this
unexpected revival of an old television tradition is unknown to me, but it was
a joy: the movie was a 2012 Weinstein Company release of a British-German
co-production called Unfinished Song,
though the original working title was Song for Marion. Written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams, Unfinished
Song deals with an elderly long-term
married couple in Britain, Arthur and Marion Harris (Terence Stamp and Vanessa
Redgrave), who deeply love each other but on the surface kvetch a lot. Arthur is introverted and mistrustful of people;
Marion is outgoing and has been singing for several years with a local choir
called the OAP’Z (and no, we’re never told why it has that name or what it
stands for). After having seen the Chapel Choir of Selwyn College at Cambridge
University at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, I suddenly felt I understood just
how seriously the British take competitive choir singing, to the extent that
that episode of the Father Brown
series which depicted rival choir directors resorting to blackmail, espionage
and even murder to win a local singing contest suddenly seemed more believable
than it had when I’d watched it. Though the contest rivalries in this story
aren’t quite so dire, it’s clear
this chorus is not only intent on practicing to get good enough to win an audition
to a major regional contest, they’re going all out to win it and their
director, Elizabeth (Gemma Arterton, who learned to play piano for this film
and played the parts herself, as Stamp, Redgrave and the other cast members
playing the choir did their own singing), takes this ultra-seriously.
What sets
this group aside from every other choir in the competition — or, one suspects,
in the entire U.K. — is their repertoire: their featured numbers include the
B-52’s “Love Shack,” Salt-n-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex,” the Motown classic
“Nowhere to Run” and the heavy-metal song “Crazy.” When the film opens Marion
has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and is expected to have only weeks to
live, but she’s still feisty enough that when she thinks Arthur has insulted
her friends in the choir, she responds by literally refusing to speak to her husband or allowing him to
speak with her. About two-fifths of the way through the movie, she finally dies
just after having debuted the big solo she was expecting to sing at the
competition — Cyndi Lauper’s hit “True Colors” (a wrench to me because it was
also the song I heard the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus sing live while my late
client Bettie Pulcrano was in the nursing home and I knew she was not long for
this world, and I used it to kick off a mix CD because it summed up the way I
felt about her and how I’d been able to look beyond her surface crankiness and
temper to see her “true colors, because you’re beautiful like a rainbow”) — and
through a series of unlikely encounters Arthur goes from hanging outside as the
remaining members of the choir rehearse for their big day to coming into the
building to joining in. What’s remarkable about this film is the quiet dignity
and strength of both the writing and the acting, and also the complexity of the
relationships between the characters: Arthur and Marion have an adult son,
James (Christopher Eccleston), but there’s so much bitterness between father
and son that at Marion’s funeral Arthur literally tells James he doesn’t want to speak to him again.
Arthur also runs afoul of the school authorities when he stops by one afternoon
and calls out to his granddaughter (James’s child) to say hello to her and give
her a chocolate bar — and he’s chewed out by a nastily overprotective teacher
who wonders just who this strange old man is who’s accosting one of the kids
and doesn’t relent just because he says he’s the girl’s grandfather. There’s
also a marvelous scene in which the expected relationship between Arthur and
the choir director Elizabeth suddenly reverses and it’s he who is supporting her through the breakup of her latest romantic
involvement instead of her supporting him through the grief over his wife’s
death.
If Unfinished Song has a
flaw, it’s that it’s too predictable: Paul Andrew Williams has obviously seen a
million previous movies and he knows all the old devices. Every time Arthur
gets cold feet and walks away from the choir, we know he’ll be back, he’ll sing
a big solo at the competition and he’ll be happy with himself in a way that
helps him get over the loss of his wife. Williams did stop short of some things he could have done with
this story, and I’m glad he didn’t: he didn’t have Arthur and Elizabeth start a
December-May romance and he didn’t have the ragtag choir win — they consider it
enough of a triumph that they placed third. There are also some rather witty
moments, like the one in which the organizers of the final competition want to
disqualify the OAP’Z because the men aren’t dressed in suits and ties and the
women in at least business-formal wear, only Arthur defiantly takes the stage,
Elizabeth joins them and the two refuse to leave until the OAP’Z are allowed to
compete. Unfinished Song is a
pretty calculated tear-jerker, but at least it’s well made and genuinely moving
in the way Williams clearly wanted it to be — and it also has the benefit of
those marvelous British actors. I don’t know if there’s something special in
their DNA or just the long-established infrastructure in which they’re trained,
but the Brits consistently produce the greatest actors in the world, with none
of this nonsense about “motivation” with which the Method-trained American
actors of the last three generations have saddled themselves with: like the
musicians of a symphony orchestra, British actors simply face the audience (or
the camera), speak their lines, hit their marks and convince you they are the
people they’re playing, no muss, no fuss, no heavy-duty “straining” to be “expressive.”
