“ORDINARY LOVE”: Nothing ordinary about it

Liam Neeson, Leslie Manville

Published March 5, 2020, by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene

“ORDINARY LOVE” My rating: B+ (Opens March 6 at the Rio)

92 minutes | MPAA rating: R

In an era of caped escapism, an intimate cancer drama like “Ordinary Love” has about as much chance as a penguin in the shark pool.

But those daring enough to take the risk will discover an acting tour de force saturated in pain and beauty, a drama that effectively tells a universal story precisely because its characters are largely unremarkable.

The challenge facing writer Owen McCafferty, directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn and their principal players (Liam Neeson and Leslie Manville) is to make their yarn compelling without resorting to heroics, histrionics or bigger-than-life characterizations.

They succeed to a degree I didn’t think possible.

Tom and Joan (Neeson, Manville) are a retired couple living in Belfast (we never do learn anything about their careers). At first glance their marriage seems more or less ideal. He’s charmingly irascible, a guy who goes for long walks with the Missus, then claims that entitles him to one more beer.

She’s no shrinking violet, apparently relishing the banter that has them dueling with gentle witticisms.

They’ve got a nice house and apparently no money woes. Their mantel feature a framed photo of a pretty young woman, obviously their daughter.  Only much later do we realize that the subject, their only child, died some years before.

The unremarkable patterns of Tom and Joan’s life are upended when she discovers a lump in her breast.

“Ordinary Love” is on one level an almost clinical look at how cancer is diagnosed and treated. Simultaneously it is an unblinking but compassionate dissection of how the disease eats away even at stable relationships.

Tom is a death denier who hates hospitals (“What’s the point of putting all the sick people together? How’s that gonna make anyone better?”); for the sake of his wife he must suppress his own fears and anger, pushing optimism even when he doesn’t really feel it. He forces himself to play the role of understanding nurturer.

But in moments of solitude his eyes cloud with fear and his massive frame seems to collapse into itself.

Joan, meanwhile, must deal with both the physical and emotional manifestations of the disease…surgery, chemo, crippling nausea. When her hair starts falling out she has Tom shave her skull. Outwardly they make a snarky game of it; inside they’re screaming.

McCafferty based his screenplay on his own wife’s bout with cancer; it is filled with revelatory small moments that feel so right that one instinctively realizes they could only have been drawn from real experience.

It’s not all grim. Over the course of a year Joan goes from terrified patient to an old hand in the chemo clinic, handing out advice and cheerful admonitions to nervous first-timers.

She strikes up a deeply touching relationship with Peter (David Wilmot), who taught her daughter in elementary school and is now dying. At the same time Tom connects with Peter’s partner Steve (Amit Shah), a young man so freaked by what’s happening to his lover that he cannot set foot in the hospital.

Barros D’Sa and Leyburn zero in on small moments; occasionally their camera drifts slowly through Tom and Joan’s home, as if soaking up their history from the environment they have built together.

The acting is off the charts. Neeson, who has spent much of his career in hero mode, digs deep into the essence of an unremarkable guy caught in life-changing turmoil, trying to do the right thing and only sometimes succeeding.

But top honors go to Manville, one of the finest actresses in the English language, who quietly but spectacularly limns Joan’s journey through fear, anger, pain and resentment to a sort of transcendent/shopworn equilibrium.

Yeah, Tom and Joan’s love is fairly ordinary.  Looked at another way, there’s nothing ordinary about it.

| Robert W. Butler