We pretend that with the dimming of the lights and the rolling of the first reel that we begin each movie with a clean slate. But of course we have allegiances, long held feelings and memories that are always within us – it’s one of the reasons that there will always be film stars. That’s why there’s something genuinely moving about watching Michael Caine at work in Is Anybody There? Playing an ageing, lonely former magician consigned to a nursing home, the consummate British screen actor reminds us of multiple decades of cinematic memories.
With thinning, silvery hair, errant whiskers and bags beneath those once menacingly hooded eye, Caine distinctive profile makes us think of Alfie’s errant charmer and The Italian Job’s Charlie Croker, the malevolent Mortwell from Mona Lisa and Hannah and Her Sisters’ Elliot, Children of Men’s playful Jasper and his calmly reproachful Alfred from The Dark Knight. There’s a lifetime of roles tied to Caine – his voice alone sparks memories – and he brings trace elements of them all to bear as the fading Clarence in John Crowley’s gentle domestic drama.
The crux of the picture is the relationship between Caine’s Clarence and Bill Milner’s Edward, an inquisitive, if somewhat morbid adolescent boy whose interest in the afterlife is fueled by living in the nursing home his parents run. It’s 1987, a date marked by the Thatcherite social decay and the bad mullet of Edward’s dad (an unrecognisable David Morrissey), when Clarence arrives, homeless but unwilling to live amidst the invalids and mildly demented. He has a hardened exterior – Caine’s swearing rhythm is timeless – but an unexpectedly soft centre. Regrets drag down Clarence’s shoulders and bend his back.
Bill Milner was last seen as the blithe young spirit who fell in love with filmmaking in another 80s British period piece, Garth Jennings’ Son of Rambow, and he has a naïve optimism the camera likes. He couldn’t play truculent if he tried. The story makes a determined effort to keep the pair at loggerheads, because it has to establish Clarence and Edward individually before they start to have an impact on each other. While the screenplay deftly lays intersecting points, such as Edward’s interest in ghosts while Clarence is haunted by the memory of the wife he lost, the story does not quickly succumb to simple pathos.
It would be easy to milk the audience’s sympathy with this performance, but what’s noticeable is the sternness and anger that permeate Clarence. It’s one of the few things that keep him going as his body struggles (magic no longer comes easily to his fingers, an echo of the ageing that all actors dread the arrival of) and his mind fades. Sundry aspects of the plot are offered up for minor problems that can be rectified, such as the marital difficulties afflicting Edward’s overworked parents, but Caine makes sure that Clarence holds on to the crust of self-loathing that marks the character’s latter life. It’s a fine and measured autumnal performance from a great of the screen.
