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Is Anybody There? stars Michael Caine as a grumpy old fella who, begrudgingly, goes to live in an old people’s home where his fellow residents are played by Rosemary Harris, Elizabeth Spriggs, Peter Vaughan, Thelma Barlow, Sylvia Syms and Leslie Phillips but not Peter O’Toole, who appears to be the one that got away. (Apparently, he is quite nippy once he gets going and a devil to catch.)
I was incredibly up for this film, imagining it as some kind of Cocoon, only hopefully not as rubbish. Plus it’s always nice to see the older actors doing their bit and taking the pressure off, say, Keira Knightley, who has been worked almost to the bone, the poor little thing. But it’s all rather underwhelming, and although my tears should have been jerked — the film does everything to make you cry bar run an onion under your nose — they were not. They stayed firmly in my ducts. I’m still, actually, trying to work out why so you may have to bear with me, which, as you know, probably won’t pay off but let me ask you this: what else are you doing that is so important or interesting? Loser!
OK, so we have Caine, and Caine is Clarence, a magician who has toured England for years in his rattling camper van painted like a circus wagon, but who knows his final stop when he sees it, and his final stop is Lark Hall, a retirement home owned and run by a married couple (Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey) who have a tenyear-old son, Eddie (Bill Milner). Eddie, who is sometimes Yorkshire and sometimes isn’t, is lonely, angry, morbidly obsessed with death and does not like Clarence, so much so he throws a clod of earth at the back of his head. Meanwhile, Clarence is bitter, resentful, loathes his fellow residents whom he refers to as ‘jabbering simpletons’ and does not like Eddie, whom he repeatedly tells to ‘bugger off’. They hate each other and continue to hate each other right up until the very end. These two could never be friends and won’t be. Hey, only kidding! Yup, they bond. (Really, you thought they wouldn’t? You so are a loser, aren’t you?)
Caine’s performance is certainly heartfelt, but it has nowhere to go, is cut off every which way by the contrived storyline — there doesn’t even seem to be any reason why Clarence and Eddie would hang out together — and the clichés, which pelt you over and over. (As you are probably aware, being pelted by a cliché is no joke and it can knock your hat off.) Is Eddie going to wow his usually indifferent peers with a trick the old guy has taught him? Yup. Is the old guy going to teach the young boy how to live while the young boy teaches the old boy how to die? You betcha. And so on and so on and so on? For sure.
As for the all-star, wonderful veterans, they are wasted. Wasted! There’s a subplot to do with Eddie’s parents — Morrissey, who sports the worst hair ever, has his eye on a female employee — that doesn’t add up to much, while Leslie, Rosemary, Sylvia, Elizabeth, Thelma and Peter (Vaughan, not O’Toole, who is possibly in France by now) are left to rot, pretty much. They just sit around like ‘jabbering simpletons’. Seriously, if wasting top-notch talent were a crime, this film would go down for life, and if it ever came up for parole, the board would laugh in its face.
All in all, too many flaws converge to make this other than a predictable and maudlin disappointment, and that’s about it, really. See, I told you it wouldn’t pay off, but don’t blame me. Is it my fault you don’t have anything more important or interesting to do?
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