Now is not the time for me to charging off on an adventure. Hove, on the south English coast. It’s 2014. 89-year old Bernie Jordan (Michael Caine) and his wife Rene (Glenda Jackson) have been living in a retirement home since Rene’s health deteriorated. Bernie, who served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, hopes to attend the 70th anniversary of D-Day but finds out that there are no spaces left on any group tours to Normandy for the event. Hesitant to leave Rene behind due to her fragile health, he is finally persuaded by Rene herself to find his own way to Normandy to join the commemorations. Bernie leaves the nursing home early one morning, encountering carer Adele (Danielle Vitalis) at the bus stop so he takes a taxi to Dover and gets a ticket on a ferry to France. On the ferry he meets RAF veteran Arthur Howard-Johnson (John Standing) who is part of a group tour. When Arthur sees Bernie with just a carrier bag and discovers that Bernie is travelling on his own, he invites him to join them and even to share his hotel room in France which is a pre-paid twin. Bernie is reluctant at first but ultimately agrees. Back in the UK, the care home staff are all in a panic over the mysterious disappearance of Bernie, whose whereabouts Rene does not reveal until much later in the day, when she confesses the truth to Adele, that he has escaped to Normandy. She has been diagnosed with a terminal illness and has only a short time left and she has not told Bernie about it because it would only worry him. Arthur gets a ticket for Bernie at the commemorative ceremony which is directly behind the Queen and President Obama but Bernie gives his ticket, and Arthur’s, away to Heinrich (Wolf Kahler) a German soldier who also fought on D-Day and has come to revisit Sword Beach. Leaving the ceremony behind, Bernie and Arthur head to the Bayeux War Cemetery, where Arthur looks for his brother’s grave while Bernie visits the grave of Douglas Bennett (Elliott Norman) a comrade-in-arms who was killed at the Normandy landing on D-Day after Bernie reassured him that he would be alright … A ninety year-old coffin dodger honours the glorious dead. The story of Bernard Jordan’s trip to the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings caught the public imagination in 2014 and inspired this and The Last Rifleman, released within weeks of each other. I’d go anywhere with you. Anywhere at all. The roles are presented with irony. Jackson’s is arrestingly lively, an unexpected pleasure given her situation in the care home where she busies herself and expresses great empathy for her young carer. Caine’s in contrast is quieter, thoughtful, focussing on the immediacy of the past before him. What a waste. When the camera tracks out wide from him at Douglas’ grave to the huge cemetery it proves a reminder that this is more than a memory. The film’s midpoint, when he listens to ex-pilot Standing’s story about his raid on Caen that likely killed his own brother is truly shocking. Indeed Standing gives probably the showiest performance in the film – complex, guilt-ridden, filled with little moments of meaning culminating in that dreadful revelation. The camaraderie in evidence with the German veteran pinpoints the idea of wasted lives while the contretemps with young black British veteran Nathan (Donald Sage Mackay) heightens the sensibility of devastated youth that pervades the theme. Interspersed with the contemporary sequences are flashbacks to Bernard in combat and his relationship with Irene during the war and they are touchingly played by Will Fletcher and Laura Marcus. There is an elegiac quality to the writing from William Ivory, qualified by the fact that Jackson died prior to the film’s release and Caine announced that it would be his swansong too. What a privilege it is to see these British cinema icons revelling in their screen element, balancing and complementing each other, scene by scene, five decades after their marvellous pairing in The Romantic Englishwoman. Directed by Oliver Parker. He has done it before. Only then of course they were shooting at him
mondomovies 