Closing the Ring (2007)

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

The final film directed by Richard Attenborough, this is far from his best work. His direction is good but is not up to the very high standard that he set for himself in his previous films. The biggest problem is with the subpar material. The script is written by Peter Woodward, probably best known for his role as Galen in the short-lived "Babylon 5" spin-off "Crusade", and it is riddled with clichés. Some things happen because it says so in the script rather than because it is a logical development. Much of the characters' behaviour does not ring - no pun intended - true. The love scenes are so badly written and relentlessly old fashioned with their unconvincing, over the top proclamations of love laced with foreshadowing of inevitable tragedy that it feels like a bad 1940s film. However, I would certainly not have minded it if felt like a good 1940s film. Don't get me wrong, I'm a very sentimental guy and I love a good romantic film. "Heaven Can Wait" (1943) and another Christopher Plummer film "Somewhere in Time" are my ninth and tenth favourite films respectively but this film is just badly written and variably acted, if well directed, schmaltz. The film is most notable as being Attenborough's final work in a hugely impressive career which stretched all the way back to "In Which We Serve" in 1942 and encompassed 66 films as an actor and 12 as a director, with "A Bridge Too Far" being the only one that fell into both categories.The best performance in the film certainly comes from the one and only Christopher Plummer, one of the best actors of his generation, as an elderly US Army Air Force veteran named Jack Etty who returns to his home town of Branagan, Michigan in 1991 to attend the funeral of one of his World War II flying buddies. He lifts the film really in a way that a lesser actor could not. Shirley MacLaine is rather good as his friend's widow Ethel Ann Harris, who rather than mourning her late husband Chuck spends most of her time drinking and reliving the memories of her first husband Teddy Gordon. He was killed in 1944 when his plane crashed in Belfast and she never got over it. I never got over the fact that I didn't care one way or the other since neither of them had much in the way of personality. Mischa Barton plays the young Ethel Ann and she's perfectly fine but fairly forgettable in the role. Stephen Amell's performance as Teddy is distractingly dreadful. Of the younger cast, the best actor is the ever likable Gregory Smith as, appropriately enough, the young Jack. As an added bonus, he even bears a passing resemblance to Plummer. The film also has nice performances from Brenda Fricker (even if she is far too young for her role), Pete Postlethwaite, Neve Campbell, Ian McElhinney and David Alpay.Another major problem with the script is that it is very badly structured. The 1940s flashbacks should have added to my understanding of the characters and made me care about them more rather than bore me. When the first scene set in Northern Ireland was accompanied by a poor imitation of Irish traditional music, I knew that I was in trouble. Sadly, the Belfast scenes get even more clichéd with respect to their depiction of both the people of Northern Ireland and the Troubles. The IRA subplot adds nothing to the film but running time and some good acting. An almost fatal problem with the film is that Ethel Ann is not a terribly likable character. Chuck was a nice, decent, reliable guy who was madly in love with her but she had no finer feeling for him whatsoever. Actually, she seemed fairly contemptuous of him. He may not have been the love of her life but he loved her, he took good care of her and he was the father of her daughter Marie. It would be a different matter entirely as if he had been abusive or neglectful. I can't say that I had any sympathy for her on that score. If she didn't love him which she clearly didn't, she shouldn't have married him. Her behaviour is disrespectful to his memory. To make matters worse, she starts a relationship with Jack mere months after Chuck's death. Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.Overall, this is a very bad film which is thankfully only a minor footnote in the career of my favourite director of all time. It would have been nice if he had ended his career on a high note but his work speaks for itself. It is marginally better than Attenborough's worst film "A Chorus Line" and is saved from holding that dubious distinction by the virtue of some good acting, particularly from Plummer. Of the 12 films that he directed, those two are the only ways that I rated below 8/10. "A Bridge Too Far", "Shadowlands" and "Oh! What a Lovely War" are all in my Top 30. I'm sorry to have watched all of his films as I feel as if I have no more worlds to conquer. He was never the most prolific of directors but this is the only time that I have watched the entire filmography of a director which fell into double digits. Probably the best thing to come of this film outside of Plummer's performance is the fact that the younger actors can boast in decades to come that they worked with him, Attenborough and Shirley MacLaine, which will be nice for them.

First of all this movie is worth watching. A historical film with a good director and attractive cast are the redeeming qualities.Mischa is lovely and her young beaus are fresh faced and earnest. It's a bit of a stretch having Shirley McLaine as her older self. Neve Campbell's character is annoying and she is too sulky looking.The storyline is a little over ambitious and confusing. The story should have been told without so much flashbacks - it was confusing because so much time and incidents and places are covered. Also the WWII element is a little bit of a let down since no real action takes place its just an accident in Ireland. Maybe it was too much ground to cover with the IRA storyline as well but they were trying for an epic.

Great filmmakers usually end their careers on a sour note and this is no exception; barring some inept future use of British lottery money it is unlikely that the knight Sir Richard (nay, call me LORD Richard) will get another 15 million pounds or so to blow again.Pick your favorite: Henry Hathaway bowed out with SUPER DUDE (a blaxploitation film I had the privilege of viewing in Cleveland on a double bill at the Scrumpy Dump Theater (!) some 35 years ago; Billy Wilder ended with BUDDY BUDDY; William Wyler had THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES (on paper a step up from SUPER DUDE, but not by all that much); Frank Capra with POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES which he really hated, per his autobiography; Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (hardly up to his high standards); Otto Preminger had THE HUMAN FACTOR, which I (alone?) liked (I've been a rabid Nicol Williamson fan since seeing him at Stratford as one of the greatest Macbeths, opposite Helen Mirren) and which costarred Attenborough. Even Michael Powell, apart from a look-back docu, culminated his career with an innocuous but hardly impressive Children's Film Foundation effort THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW, which I watched once at MoMA for completeness. There are obvious exceptions: Joe Mankiewicz bowed out with SLEUTH, an estimable movie and David Lean's A PASSAGE TO India was a winner.Per the particularly self-serving (and useless) "making of" featurette on the DVD release titled "Love, Loss & Life", CLOSING THE RING is the folly of several producers who fell in love with a first-timer's screenplay based on the actual finding of an old wedding ring in the Irish hills. The flimsy, yet convoluted, script got funding and, per the interviews, bowled over Attenborough, too. How audience members react, limited to video fans in the U.S. where the Weinsteins thought better of wasting money on a theatrical release, is an individual matter, but the tired blood on screen here is frankly an embarrassment.Some cinematic lions, notably Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer, as well as from a more recent generation Brenda Fricker and Pete Postlethwaite, are matched against some young talent, but the performances are uniformly poor. Having seen all of Attenborough's theatrical releases in first-run I concede he is capable of very good (Gandhi) but when he is bad, he turns out execrable material, notably the insulting A CHORUS LINE adaptation. I enjoyed YOUNG WINSTON, but then again I liked NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA by Schaffner back then too -pageantry is easy to take. But when Richard tried a genre film MAGIC for Joseph E. Levine, after making A BRIDGE TOO FAR for that once-famous showman, mediocrity ruled -about 10 steps below no-budget maestro Lindsay Shonteff's DEVIL DOLL. Despite the filmmakers' protests of how moving and inspirational this love story hit them, on the screen it is flat and dull. The young cast, led by Mischa Barton, gives paper-thin performances, and the attempt by Attenborough "to be hip" by having Barton nude a couple of times is beneath contempt. That's as old a ploy as THE YELLOW TEDDY BEARS, a well-meaning (and boring) British exploitation film from 1964 for which I saw a vintage U.S. coming attraction just this past weekend (resuscitated by Something Weird Video) in which extraneous nude scenes were added to release it stateside as GUTTER GIRLS. Now I might accuse the Weinsteins of such ploys, but for Richard to stoop that low -wow!The back and forth plotting from 1941 (actually 1944 it turns out in the narrative later) and 1991 to shoehorn in the Irish Troubles is undigested screen writing of the worst order. Connections between the two are lame and all the "maybe" and suggestive material goes nowhere. For example, strident Neve Campbell (a performance worse even than her terrible effort in the Alan Rudolph dud about sex INTIMATE AFFAIRS) as Shirley's grown up daughter creates wonderment as to "who's her daddy" but it turns out to be strictly a red herring, time-wise. Ditto casting Fricker of all people as the old-age version of a W.W. II "tart" who slept with all the Yanks -this hook is dangled for the viewer and left unresolved. Postlethwaite is perhaps the best performer in this one, but his role is 100% functional, designed for a big "reveal" only.I've never seen MacLaine so disinterested (and uninteresting) in a movie- she looks like she's playing under protest. The character of a woman who had basically three beaux but wasted her life attached to the dead one is admittedly unplayable but she doesn't even try. Plummer has more energy, perhaps he alone was given Geritol on the set, but this is a thankless assignment as the "good buddy" who never got the girl. The debuting young Irish thesp Martin McCann is insufferably cheery in what turns out to be the lead role, the boy who found "the ring". Closeups and other emphasis on the object make one think we are living in the shadow of Tolkien, but needless to say this totem is of zero importance.CLOSING THE RING is so bad one is reminded of the late Frank Perry's disastrously soapy MOMMIE DEAREST and MONSIGNOR, for which a wonderful director ended up being the butt of catcalls from Midnight Movie audiences. Unfortunately, its plotting is too dull and execution too mediocre for this lame RING to end up with any such afterlife, avoiding even the pitiful fate of having Hedda Lettuce lead camp followers in weekly derision at my local Chelsea (NY division, not England) cinema.

Shirley MacLaine over her years has quietly gone about her business as one of the best actresses ever to grace the screen. She does it without much fanfare but is flat out good. Here she is Ethel Ann, in her 70s in 1991, at her long-time husband's funeral. But she seems detached, not only from the ceremony itself, but the rest of the world. Even Neve Campbell as her daughter Marie can't figure out what is going on.At the same time a couple of men far away in Belfast, Northern Ireland are spending their spare time rooting around the hillside outside town, salvaging bits and pieces of an American B47 airplane that had crashed there nearly 50 years earlier. We suspect there is a connection between this plane crash and Ethel Ann's unresolved issues.This is a good movie with very little "action" but a good story with fine acting. Christopher Plummer is her same-age friend Jack. The movie is told in both present 1990s time and 1940s time, cutting back and forth as appropriate. Mischa Barton is the young Ethel Ann in the 1940s, friends with young soldiers as they prepare to go to war as pilots and crew members.SPOILERS FOLLOW: Ethel Ann had fallen in love with a young enlisted man, Chuck, who was building a house and told her it was for her. Even though he was shipping out, as a gunner, they had a ceremony and got "married" by a seminary student, but was not a legally recognized union. Still, they had a gold ring engraved inside with her name, and Chuck carried it with him on his mission. Chuck was killed in that plane crash, due to faulty navigation in bad weather, but Ethel Ann never received proof that he died. She had still held hope all those years that the "love of her life" had somehow survived, and never really loved or committed to the husband she was burying at the beginning of the movie. Only when the Irish men found the wedding band in the dirt of the hillside, and brought it to her, was she able to move forward with her life.