Title: Still Life (2013)
Country: UK
Score: 7
Still Life (winner
of this year’s juried SLIFF interfaith award) is about loneliness and death,
two topics most films and most people try not to think too much about. Even
when films go after such downbeat material, they often treat it glibly. Still
Life is a counterexample. Still Life is sincere. Very, very, almost
oppressively sincere.
John May’s
government job is to search for living relatives, or failing that, friends, of
people who are found deceased and alone. If he can find no one he arranges
their funeral for them, often picking out the religious denomination of the
ceremony, the music and the coffin (or urn), himself. He even writes the
eulogies, based on photos and objects around their homes.
John is working on
a particularly tough case, a relatively unlikable and probably abusive
ex-military, ex-convict, ex-husband named Billy Stokes, when he finds out this
will be his last case. His job is being made redundant. His facile boss points
out that John is notoriously slow and expensive anyway, what with his
‘excessive’ respect for the dead. Mr. May decides to go the extra mile, and
manages to track down clues that take him to many who knew Stokes, including
coworkers, lovers, fellow soldiers, bums and even his gentle daughter, Kelly.
Both Eddie Marsan,
who is sadly all-too-frequently typecast as a thug or villain, and Joanne
Froggatt, who I love from Downton Abbey, give extremely sensitive and
note-perfect performances. Though Still Life is a bit too monotonously respectful and gloomy for my taste, it does have
occasional moments of quiet, graceful humor that worked consistently well. In
fact, the film takes almost no missteps until it almost falls off a cliff at
the end, with a twist that is clearly supposed to be bittersweet irony, but
instead struck me as distastefully cheap. It sets up the films undeniably
poignant conclusion, but my mood has been too poisoned by the tonal cost to
fully appreciate it.
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