45 YEARS
Cinetic Media
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for CompuServe ShowBiz. Databased on Rotten Tomatoes.
Grade: B
Director: Andrew Haigh
Written by: Andrew Haigh from story “In Another Country” by David Constantine
Cast: Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay, Geraldine James, Dolly Wells, David Sibley, Sam Alexander, Richard Cunningham
Screened at: Review, NYC, 9/29/15
Opens: December 23, 2015
In America fifty percent of first marriages end in divorce, sixty percent of second marriages go south, and seventy percent of third marriages go kaput. This does not mean that the people who go through the agonies of separation have failed: after all, we have our ups and downs and maybe human beings were not meant to be monogamous for fifty years or even twenty. Similarly, when you find a couple living together in matrimony for forty-five, fifty years, you cannot assume that they have been blessed. They may be sticking together for the children, for the business, or just out of inertia. The couple highlighted by Andrew Haigh in “45 Years” have been married for (3 guesses, give up?) for forty-five years and are about to celebrate their anniversary with a big bash in a Norfolk England village when news come to Geoff Mercer (Tom Courtenay) that his principal love, or maybe wife with whom he paired years before his present marriage, is dead: found in the Swiss Alps perfectly preserved for fifty years with Geoff Mercer named next of kin. When he reads the letter to his wife, with whom he lives in retirement in a country cottage, something strange happens, something you don’t expect to happen except in the movies and in short stories. Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling) becomes jealous. Why so? After all it’s not as though her husband cheated on her, but there arises some evidence that Geoff had been married to the woman he now calls “my Katya” and she may have been pregnant; information that Geoff has kept from his wife all this time. It does not take long for Kate to head up to attic to discover pictures of her husband and his s.o. in more youthful, passionate times. Most of all, what Kate is missing and which is only implied by Andrew Haigh’s script, is children. True, they are childless but apparently had not until now make an issue of that fact. However in David Constantine’s short story “In Another Country,” which writer-director Haigh adapts for the screen, the lack of a more populous family makes Kate wonder whether she has wasted almost half a century of her life with nothing much to show for it, no great accomplishment, not even a child.
Haigh, whose “Weekend,” a gay romance in which a fellow, after a drunken party with straight friends, heads to a bar to pick up another, is exuberant where “45 Years” is economic and guarded. This makes “45 Years” particularly for the arthouse crowds, for people who have the patience to sift through motivations only hinted at, and should be of special import to those in the audience who are elderly or have had long-term marriages and other relationships. Tom Courtenay, most famous perhaps for his portrayal in “Dr. Zhivago” and known for social-realist “kitchen sink” drama of the sixties, turns in a performance (did I say “restrained”?) that matches that of Charlotte Rampling—who cannot perform anything badly. Think of Rampling as Sarah Morton in François Ozon’s “Swimming Pool,” playing a British mystery writer whose contact with her publisher’s unusual daughter in the South of France puts her in contact with a girl of unrepressed sexuality.
Ultimately you see “45 Years” for the performances in this essentially two-hander movie, realistic about the pitfalls of a long marriage despite an outward projection of general happiness. Given its lack of melodrama, its deliberate pacing, its mere suggestion of emotional challenges, Haigh’s film comes across as too controlled to arouse more than a modicum of audience regard outside of an appreciatopm for characterizations of two real pros.
Unrated. 93 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – B-
Acting – A-
Technical – B
Overall – B
