So, I had Jupiter Ascending lined up to write about today. I landed up with more on my plate yesterday than planned, though, and by the time I sat down to watch it I found myself at that particularly awkward level of tired where I caught too much to want an immediate re-watch but not enough to have an informed opinion. It may have been visionary, it may have been dire - my suspicion is that it was probably a mix of the two. I'll take another look at some point and let you know.
In any case, this morning I found myself glancing over the iPlayer listings with Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut Quartet already in mind. Normally I wouldn't go for a comedy drama set in a retirement home for ageing performers, but the four headline cast members were Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins and Maggie Smith, all of whom have a stellar pedigree, not to mention career longevity. All of this meant I went in with certain expectations - gently beautiful cinematography, a restrained but tear-jerking soundtrack and one or two well-timed expletives, but no more than that.
There isn't really much of a story here - just the aforementioned bunch of luminaries playing elderly opera singers at the aforementioned retirement home. There's a concert on the horizon - a fundraiser, apparently to keep the place going for another year or two. Michael Gambon's Cedric (pronounced Ziedrich) is directing, and is determined not to let anybody forget. Cissy (Pauline Collins), meanwhile, forgets almost everything, but nobody really minds because she's so unutterably sweet; besides, she has her friends Wilf (Billy Connolly) and Reggie (Tom Courtenay) to look out for her. Once, many decades ago, the three of them brought the operatic world to its knees with their performance of the quartet from Rigoletto, so when the final member of their foursome takes up residence at the home, there's only one question on everybody's lips.
The answer, of course, is a no-brainer; if I were feeling uncharitable, I might say that so is the rest of the film. This is a movie that's been very carefully designed not only not to scare the horses, but not to overexcite them or emotionally agitate them in any but the very tamest of ways. And so we get to watch our elderly beautiful people wander gracefully around their stately home and its equally stately grounds, and we try not to wonder how many thousands of pounds a single ticket would have had to cost for the concert proceeds to keep the place going for more than a couple of weeks. It's that sort of piece, though, the sort where we're encouraged to see Cissy's worsening Alzheimer's as some sort of amusing personality quirk, and to cheerfully ignore the fact that Wilf is a sex pest who might actually benefit from a good hard kick to the bollocks.
Once again, I find myself wanting to guiltily explain that this isn't a bad film - it's easy on the eye, the acting is just fine and I love the fact that the home's residents are all former stage stars. It all just feels a little too smooth, though, as though it was funded by the UK tourist board, offering foreign buyers that sort of soft and easily-digestible blandness that plays well to people who want to see my country as some sort of island-sized theme park. I'm not denying that it's good to see older people taking centre stage, but wouldn't it be even better to see them playing characters rather than crowd-pleasing archetypes? There's any number of British films being made about disaffected youth struggling to get by despite grinding poverty, so what about our working class pensioners? Who's writing stories about them? The more I think about it, the more angry it makes me that this sort of patronising, witless pabulum is how the UK represents itself abroad.
...Okay, done now. If you like Downton Abbey, you'll probably like Quartet, too. For shame, you. For shame, Dustin Hoffman.
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