Last Orders is a 2001 British/German drama film written and directed by Fred Schepisi. The screenplay is based on the 1996 Booker Prize-winning novel Last Orders by Graham Swift.
Plot
The title refers to a pub landlord's last call and the final wishes of a dying man, in this instance Jack Dodds, an east London butcher who greatly influenced four men over the course of his flawed but decent life. The quartet gathers to scatter Jack's ashes in Margate, where he had hoped to retire to a small seaside cottage with his wife Amy, a dream that was never fulfilled. The four are professional horse racegambler Ray Johnson, aka Lucky, who fought beside Jack during World War II and has been his best friend since; former boxer Lenny, who is always ready to settle an argument with his fists; undertaker Vic who acts as a buffer of sorts and Jack's son Vince, a dealer of used luxury cars, whose relationship with his father never quite recovered when, as a young boy, he learned his real family perished in a wartime bombing and Jack and Amy took in the orphaned infant and raised him as their own. As the quartet journeys from London by car to honour Jack's request, with stops at Canterbury Cathedral, the Chatham Naval Memorial, the hop farm where Jack and Amy met and a couple of pubs, they reminisce about their friend. Amy is on a journey of her own to visit their daughter June who has learning difficulties and was institutionalized shortly after her birth fifty years earlier. Over the years Jack barely acknowledged her existence but Amy faithfully visited her weekly, even though June had no idea of who she was or why she visited. Through frequent flashbacks that stretch across six decades, the stories of the events that brought these people to this point in their lives slowly unfold, ultimately revealing the importance of friendship and love.
A.O. Scott of The New York Times observed, "For Mr. Schepisi... the principal challenge must have been how to translate the specific gravity of Mr. Swift's prose, with its multiple narrators and its stripped-down cockney lyricism, into the light and shadow of cinema... has succeeded beyond all expectation... In the past Mr. Schepisi has used his elegant, unassuming visual sense and his instinctive feel for the idiosyncrasies of actors to open up the works of playwrights like David Hare and John Guare. Last Orders, though quite different in theme and structure, shares with these films a quiet, amused wonder at the complexities of human character, and a reluctance to shoehorn them into narrative conventions or deduce obvious morals." Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle called the film "an enervated, overly muted drama that should have been a lot livelier, considering the terrific cast" and added, "The actors do their best, particularly the impeccable Mirren, but Schepisi draws a shroud of chaste dullness over their scenes and lays on an energy- sapping score... The action moves constantly between present and past, which isn't a bad narrative scheme, but when it's done so frequently and deliberately, we feel as if we're looking over Schepisi's shoulder as he diagrams the whole story for us." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it "a funny and touching film" and "a bawdy delight" and commented, "The acting is of the highest order, but the magnificent Mirren... is the film's glory and its grieving heart." Philip French of The Guardian called the film "a moving study of the pleasures and obligations of friendship, and of facing up to a death and going on" and added, "Schepisi always handles actors sympathetically and here he has a perfect cast, most of whom can draw on their own and their parents' experiences. Without a touch of patronisation, they sink into their characters and never attempt to steal scenes from each other." Peter Bradshaw, French's colleague at the same newspaper, said, "I sometimes felt more than a little coerced by the emotion being deployed" but added, "lassy is indubitably what this film is - as well as intelligent, high-minded, and touching." Neil Smith of the BBC said "The plot may be on the mawkish side, but that doesn't stop Fred Schepisi's adaptation... being a gentle, affecting mix of road movie and soap opera. It helps that the Australian director has assembled a crack cast... Brian Tufano's handsome widescreen photography and Paul Grabowsky's excellent music turn this fairly parochial melodrama into something really rather special." Time Out New York described it as "Sober, even elegiac in tone, and elegantly shot" and added, " At the film's heart is an attempt to suggest the extraordinary nature of ordinary people, and if it fails to achieve profundity, it still makes for one of the most rewarding and authentic depictions of/tributes to the Cockneyway of life in recent years."
