Closing the Ring

Some veteran performers save this silly melodrama from total decay, writes Donald Clarke.

CLOSING THE RING **

Directed by Richard Attenborough. Starring Shirley MacLaine, Christopher Plummer, Mischa Barton, Pete Postlethwaite, Brenda Fricker, Neve Campbell, Martin McCann15A cert, gen release, 119 min

The longer Richard Attenborough's career as a director stumbles on, the more one appreciates his talents as an actor. For all the well-intended bustle of Ghandi and the rainy- bank-holiday familiarity of A Bridge Too Far, his lordship has yet to achieve anything behind the camera to compare with his peerless performances in Brighton Rock, The Great Escape and 10 Rillington Place.

If there was any happy intelligence to be gleaned from the old man's staggeringly dreadful Grey Owl - that thing with Pierce Brosnan as a fake American Indian - it was that, thus embarrassed, he would surely never again be allowed anywhere near an editing suite.

No such luck. Ten years have passed and Dickie is back with a temporally deranged melodrama set in rural Michigan and the outskirts of working-class Belfast. Is it any good? Well, the film features at least three cast members of Give My Head

Peace, the legendarily hopeless Northern Irish sitcom, and none of them is the worst thing in the film. So, no, it's not likely to be confused with Citizen Kane.

Calling to mind aspects of the icky cult hit The Notebook, Closing the Ring begins in the early 1990s, as mighty Shirley MacLaine copes badly with the recent death of her husband. To the dismay of her daughter (Neve Campbell) and an old pal (Christopher Plummer), the loveable battle-axe appears to be more interested in knocking back the bourbon and making withering remarks than getting down to some proper grieving.

By way of explanation, the film takes us back 50 years and introduces us to Shirley as a young woman. Rather than the charismatic firecracker we remember from The Trouble With Harry, she is here represented as the bland accumulation of vapours known to the world as Mischa Barton. War in Europe is looming and, somewhat implausibly, this cipher of a character has bewitched three budding airmen, one of whom will, we assume, become her late husband.

The chap played by the drab Stephen Amell eventually persuades her to take her top off - it's best not to think about Lord Attenborough's onset directions here - and, after soda pop and other period indicators, goes through an unofficial marriage ceremony with her. Then she takes her top off again.

A third strand of the story returns us to 1990s Belfast, where former fireman Pete Postlethwaite digs away at the side of a neighbouring mountain. His excavations eventually unearth bits of a second World War American bomber. Are you still with me?

Peter Woodward's script trades in Mills and Boon melodrama of the crudest stripe: something awful is walled up behind this bookcase; every death will have its echo in another passing decades hence; Christopher Plummer twirls his cane and ties Shirley MacLaine to the railway lines (okay, we made that up). The acting by the younger Americans is woeful and the second World War sequences betray the economy of their creation.

For all that, this avalanche of low-grade hokum is never anything other than watchable. Full credit for that must go to the senior actors, who almost manage to make the incredible credible. It's just as well that Barton shares no scenes with Plummer, MacLaine, Postlethwaite or Brenda Fricker, for they would have acted her off the screen, down the aisle and into the popcorn stall.

Two thumbs up should also be put the way of young Northerner Martin McCann. His charming performance as a naive buddy of Postlethewaite's transcends the sentimental dialogue and offers us the sort of plucky youngster Attenborough used to play in films such as In Which We Serve and A Matter of Life and Death. If Martin can resist the temptation to get drawn into directing big, dull movies - or appearing in Give My Head Peace - he should go far.