Last Orders

Four old men meet in a London pub. They have their friend Jack's ashes with them and are taking him to Margate to scatter them in the sea. Along the way, in flashback, fifty years of friendship open up: a marriage, an affair, and a child nobody has ever discussed. Fred Schepisi writes and directs, from Graham Swift's Booker winning novel. The cast is the most striking thing about it: Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, Ray Winstone and Helen Mirren. The five men come from different generations of British cinema and every one of them is playing against type. The novel's structure is polyphonic, each section in a different voice. Schepisi does not transpose that directly but he keeps breaking time; the scenes arrive not in sequence but in the order memory supplies them. The real subject is not death but class and silence. These men have said nothing to each other in fifty years and are not about to start. The weight of the whole thing sits in what goes unsaid. It stayed small and never reached a wide audience, and is remembered as one of the strongest accumulations of acting in British cinema at that moment. Who it is for: viewers who like British character drama and quiet films about age. Who it is not for: the time shifts are frequent, and with different actors playing the younger versions it is easy to lose track of who is who in the first half.