Song For Marion
Unfinished Song

This small British movie about death and community singing presents a tonal combination that should make for either a complete disaster or a wonderful surprise. In this case, however, it's merely a serviceable drama. Terence Stamp plays a grumpy old man whose wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave, is dying of cancer. She refuses to quit partaking in a community choir of old-age pensioners led by a spunky twenty-something, played by Gemma Arterton. Stamp doesn't approve of the choir but wants his wife to be happy in her final months, and so an uneasy tension is created between the three leads. For the most part, this film avoids the expected path of many cutesy British comedies about older people, instead concentrating on straightforward character study, resulting in an engaging examination of how impending death affects a long-lived marriage. The film offers numerous opportunities for Stamp and Redgrave to showcase their unique talents in subtle and nuanced ways.

However, this is one of those pictures that delivers nothing more than what you'd expect, with no surprises for its audience. Since we know what will happen at every point in the story, a film like this must not only have extraordinary performances, but it can not have any false moments to break its tenuous hold on us. Stamp and Redgrave are both wonderful actors and cherished old-school movie stars, so they do make the movie worth seeing, but writer/director Paul Andrew Williams makes several major missteps in the film's third act. By failing to make the conflict between Stamp and his estranged son (Christopher Eccleston) feel fully credible, and by overplaying every aspect of the film's inevitable climax, Williams commits the cardinal sin of small British movies. In these films, showing less always shows so much more.