the washington post.
friday, february 21, 2020eZ28
Movies
against the tumultuous backdrop
of World War II, and this one,
well, is more concerned with how
many Brussels sprouts to buy.
The point being: Even when
questions of life and death loom
large, someone still has to make
dinner. That observation doesn’t
make “Ordinary Love” a major
motion picture event. But it does,
in its own quiet, wise way, nudge
it just a little bit closer to the
extraordinary.
[email protected]Ordinary Love
Bleecker StreetR. At landmark’s Bethesda row
cinema and the Angelika Film
center Mosaic. contains brief
sexuality and nudity. 92 minutes.ments and their side effects, and
the aftermath. (“Ordinary Love”
is not for anyone who, like To m,
hates hospitals. Interestingly, the
film — which was shot in Belfast,
where the United Kingdom’s Na-
tional Health Service provides
most services free — never men-
tions cost once.)
But this is no medical drama.
As much focus as the film
devotes to clinical procedures,
even more of it is directed at
relationships. In addition to To m
and Joan’s marriage, which has
the warm if slightly itchy feel of a
pair of well-worn wool socks, the
film also looks at Joan’s friend-
ship with a fellow cancer patient
(David Wilmot), who used to
teach their late daughter.
That loss — mentioned only
obliquely and without specifics —
informs To m and Joan’s unusual-ly close bond, as well as offering
the opportunity for a slightly con-
trived scene in which To m deliv-
ers a monologue at his dead
daughter’s gravesite, while his
wife is having tests at the hospi-
tal. To be fair, To m does acknowl-
edge the absurdity of “talking to a
bit of stone,” a s he puts it. And the
speech, in which he confesses his
own vulnerability, only takes
place at Joan’s insistence (it’s the
anniversary of their daughter’s
birthday).
Otherwise, the screenplay by
Irish playwright Owen McCaffer-
ty (“Quietly”) is a lovely, under-
stated thing.
I t does include some heavy
conversations, freighted by To m
and Joan’s reciprocal fears and
insecurities, and we see the toll
these stresses take on them in an
ugly argument that flares late inA moving story in the mundane details
BY MICHAEL O’SULLIVANL
esley Manville is one of
those actresses from
whom it’s hard to look
away. And the movie “Or-
dinary Love,” which tracks one
particularly tough year in the life
of a long-married couple, takes
full advantage of that fact, to our
great benefit. Liam Neeson, also
easy on the eyes, plays the stoic
husband, but Manville, as a wom-
an who receives a frightening
cancer diagnosis early in the film,
demands our attention every sec-
ond she’s on screen, whether
scared, smiling, poker-faced or —
when chemo makes her hair fall
out — getting her head shaved by
her attentive, wryly teasing
spouse.
Manville plays Joan, and
Neeson her husband To m, in a
moving story that is bookended
by two Christmases, taking us
through 12 months of medical
tests, surgeries, therapeutic treat-the film. Frankly, the fight is
necessary from a storytelling
standpoint, adding critical tex-
ture to a tale that might otherwise
be all about the unstinting devo-
tion of a selfless spouse.
B ut true to its title, “Ordinary
Love’s” true subject is the mun-
dane, not the melodramatic.
Much of the film centers on
quotidian routine: meals; shop-
ping for groceries; the daily walks
that To m and Joan take; their
bickering about traffic and To m’s
annoying habits; and, when she
gets sick, the domestic adjust-
ments made to accommodate
painkillers, nausea and, inevita-
bly, far more major sacrifices.
Despite the serious subject
matter, “Ordinary Love” might
sound, by one measure, slight. As
Humphrey Bogart observed in
“Casablanca,” “It doesn’t take
much to see that the problems of
three little people don’t amount
to a hill of beans in this crazy
world.” But that film was setGently observational film tracks a tough year in the
life of a long-married couple facing a health crisisLiam Neeson and
Lesley Manville
make it hard to
look away from
the screen in
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