Closing the Ring

A film that ties two periods together. In Belfast a man finds a ring on a hill where an old aircraft came down. There is an inscription inside it and he decides to look for its owner. The trail leads to Michigan, in America. Ethel lives there. She has just come from her husband's funeral, is estranged from her daughter and does not talk about her past. The narrative goes back. 1941: as a young woman Ethel spends her time with three friends and all of them enlist. She marries a pilot and he is killed in a crash over Northern Ireland. The man she married years later is another of that group. What the film is interested in is what went unsaid: the woman spent her whole marriage with the memory of another man and told nobody. The narrative gives the two lines in turn and joins them in the last section. Shirley MacLaine plays Ethel, Christopher Plummer her husband and Mischa Barton her younger self. Neve Campbell and Pete Postlethwaite are in the cast. Richard Attenborough directed; it was his last film. An emotional example for anyone who likes classical melodrama and wartime stories. For a viewer who wants restraint, the film keeps its emotional pitch high and the connections are made too neatly.