Last Orders is about five men and two women who have spent much of their lives in one another's company, a lot of it in a pub called the Coach & Horses (on the cover of the first edition is a closeup photo of a pint of beer in want of a refill). Jack, Vince, Ray, Lenny, Vic, Amy, and Mandy share the narration of the story, a group of typically hapless human beings who find friendship and loyalty, but also loss and betrayal.
Graham Swift, who wrote the novel, could not have asked for a finer director and cast to outfit his book's movie adaptation. We, however, could have asked for a better occasion to assemble them than for this relentless, cumulatively futile drive from Bermondsey in South London to Margate on the east coast to scatter, as directed by the deceased, a pot of ashes off the end of a pier on a rainy April day.
Swift's novel won the Booker Prize for 1996. Such awards have become misleading to aspiring readers. When I got around to reading it - not because it was a Booker Prize-winner - I was surprised by its slightness, even at 304 pages. Awarding the Booker Prize to Swift became subsequently controversial when he was accused of lifting the plot of his story from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Too bad Swift didn't lift more than Faulkner's plot.
What is most bewildering about the film, from Schepisi's own script, is that the illustrations of the novel that it provides seem so perfunctory. On the day trip to Margate, the four surviving male friends play out their lifelong regrets and resentments like they're scattering more than just Jack's ashes along the way. Jack's presence in an urn inside a box or a plastic bag that one or another of them are appointed to carry, should've been similar to the presence of Alfredo Garcia's head in a sack in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Instead, the urn is more like a cross they each have to bear for an allotted time.
Swift is an excellent writer, even when he's writing everything in cockney vernacular. But even some of the best writers can't handle vernacular speech (I think of Kipling's horrors), since it was never the language they used. They can never avoid moments of beauty when a character starts talking like they're momentarily Graham Swift instead of Ray or Lenny.
Visiting the War Memorial at Chatham, the gang don't seem to want to leave:
The sun goes in again behind the edge of a cloud but only for a moment. I look at the view too, I don’t want to lose it either, but I turn and walk on down, following the others, so the trees come up and the view slips away. It’s shivery among the trees. (Ray)
And the worst are the Homes, since you know they aren’t homes at all, it’s just a sweet-sounding name for a clearing station for the handicapped or the old, or a stand-in for that word you mustn’t use any more: asylum. And you know that for lots of them it wasn’t such a short stay, that this was where the deceased lived maybe most, maybe all of their life, and that life, in this case, meant a kind of death, a kind of not having a home to go to. (Vic)
life’s not ever so unfair that there’s not a worse unfairness than yours, and that you can’t ever get so stuck in your ways that there aren’t worse ways of being stuck, like from the word go and for always. (Ray)
More than 20 years before Fred Schepisi arrived at Last Orders he had made one of the best films of the Australian New Wave, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), itself based on a fine novel by Thomas Kenneally. His career outside Australia started out on shaky ground with the thoughtful but silly Iceman (though it was a terrific commercial for cryogenics) and the thoughtful Western Barbarosa (with Willy Nelson and a very good Gary Busey). But then Schepisi made of David Hare's play Plenty, with plenty of help from Meryl Streep, as good as a film as it could've been. And he returned to Australia, with Streep in tow, to make A Cry in the Dark, aka Evil Angels.
Early in the pre-production of Last Orders, Schepisi got commitments from all the male principals except David Hemmings. Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, and Bob Hoskins between them carry more baggage than a bellboy at the Waldorf. Very late in the novel we discover the reason why Jack's wife Amy isn't going to Margate with the boys. It's Thursday, which has always been the day when she's visiting her daughter June, who is mentally disabled, in a home where she has lived all her life.
In the film, Amy is introduced early, played by Helen Mirren. In all those years Jack never once visited June or spoke of her. Bob Hoskins, as "Lucky" Ray, and Helen Mirren, as Amy, are back together for the first time since The Long Good Friday. David Hemmings plays Lenny, the goofball of the group. (His eyebrows were beginning to look like wings.) You will do a double take when you see the Young Lenny, who is played by Nolan Hemmings. It's a sweet touch. Two years later, David Hemmings died of a heart attack at 62 on a film set in Romania. Oddly, Michael Caine, the biggest star in the cast, comes across the least substantially. The actor who plays him as a young man - (identified in the credits as JJ Feild) - is more of a presence in the film than Caine.
One of the obvious differences in the movie of Last Orders is having to adjust my American imagination. As soon as the four of them pile into the Mercedes, or the "Merc," in and out of which so much of the action takes place, the steering wheel, of course, is on the right. In the book, I forgot this simple fact and imagined the wheel on the left. And there's a great deal more weather in the book - the usual English wind and rain. Almost all the weather in the film was very unEnglish bright sunshine.
Two major changes made by the film are the one in which Jack (Michael Caine) dies just as his winning horse comes in at 33 to 1, and Ray (Bob Hoskins) telling Amy about the winnings and asking her to come to Australia (to visit his daughter Sally) with him. In the book Ray returns the £1,000 that Jack borrowed from Vince to place the bet, but he keeps the rest for himself. These changes made by Schepisi fail to give his film a raison d'être. What was needed was a gesture much grander than the one depicted, a bigger risk taken, much more passion, a blowout, instead of the wan and weak and rather dreary gesture that Schepisi was stuck with. Jack may not have deserved a better send-off, but that incredible cast certainly did.
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