Didn't fancy anything I had prepared yesterday, so I decided I'd raid iPlayer instead. This hasn't been terribly fruitful lately, admittedly, but iPlayer tends to be like a charity shop - nine times out of ten the contents will be boring and/or slightly embarrassing, but the tenth time makes it worth the effort. Which is how I found My Talks With Dean Spanley, which was listed as being a tale of an Edwardian father and son brought closer by a mutual interest in spiritualism. I'm not normally a fan of period drama and I'm certainly not a fan of spiritualists (or anybody who chooses to make a profit by deceiving the bereaved, for that matter) but the whole thing sounded just close enough to an early tale of stage magic to pique my curiosity, so I'd decided to give it a shot.
The entire thing was far weirder than I could have imagined, and unfortunately it's one of those cases where spoilers would be a crime. Here, therefore, are the basics: the late Peter O'Toole plays Fisk Senior an elderly father and seeming emotional cripple, unable to register any emotion at all at either the death of his youngest son in the Boer war or his wife's subsequent passing. Jeremy Northam is his son, Fisk Junior, whose weekly visits only end in mind games and verbal abuse. Junior isn't particularly fond of his father, but as an idealised Edwardian man he is determined to do his duty. It is this that leads him to a spiritualist meeting at the house of cricketer Nawab of Ranjiput, which in turn permits him to make the acquaintance of one Dean Spanley, a member of the Catholic clergy who, when plied with expensive Tokay wine, demonstrates a unique and bizarre party trick.
As slight and strange a piece of cinema as you're ever likely to see, Dean Spanley took well over half it's 90-odd minute runtime to win me over. The performances tend towards the stagey; Peter O'Toole basically plays himself, and as the titular character Sam Neill is happy to indulge his predilection for ham. Oh, and speaking of pork, with only one named female character, the piece is something of a sausage fest, too.
On balance, though, I didn't mind any of this, because I'll forgive most things when there's a little honest-to-goodness weird involved. Besides, the cinematography is elegant in its restraint, lent zest by a wry, dry soundtrack that's not afraid to stir a little mischief. And when, in the end, it all came together in a climax that left me openly weeping, I didn't begrudge this as much as I usually do.
Well worth a look, even if this isn't normally your sort of thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment