Film Review: Quartet

Quartet (2012). Director Dustin Hoffman.

I have reviewed books and plays on the Diary, and of course I review cars in my 'day life', writes Brian Byrne. I haven't, however, reviewed a film before here. But I have to recommend for a complete break from the blockbuster genre that only seems to get headlines and main cinema runs these days a movie I came across on Netflix the other night.

'Quartet' is set in an English retirement country home for musicians, and its cast is an ensemble of some of the best of British actors and musicals performers of the last 50 years. I mention Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon and Pauline Collins, and there is a cohort of my readers out there who will know what I mean. For the rest of you, well, tear yourselves away from Facebook and Twitter for a couple of hours and you might find something more enduring. Certainly much more entertaining.

The story is based around a trio of retired opera singers in the home, who, when the other member of the the 'Rigoletto' quartet for which they were once most famous arrives there, try to reform their performance as the finale for a Gala Concert which could provide enough funds to keep the home in existence.

It is sad, happy, unnerving, invigorating, beautifully shot, and uses all the classic small themes that make up this kind of story. And they don't appear to be cliches because of wonderful individual performances by absolutely everyone concerned. Even the passer-by parts are perfect cameos. And most of the supporting cast are themselves retired musicians, who simply perform themselves.

The filmwork in a Buckinghamshire country house is elegantly evocative, reflecting the very best of an English rural environment in a good summer. John de Borman's cinematography reaches the highest of benchmarks in this particular ambience, arguably setting its own in some parts.

Maybe it's because I'm living my way closer to the age of most of the cast, and of the director himself at the age of 75, I absolutely enjoyed this one. Perhaps it's also because I have grown up watching all of them on the silver screen, and they have each given me much enjoyment in the practice of their crafts and artistry over the decades we have shared.

I'm at a calculation of years when I'd have been expected by many to be retired. I don't plan on that for as long as I'm able to do what is my particular 'work', and clearly none of the sometimes much older actors and musicians in this production have no intention of dropping off the scene, either, for some time. So apart from being a beautiful movie, it's an affirmation that life goes on until you stop.

I smiled often while watching 'Quartet'. I laughed, sometimes winced with empathy, and I cried real tears at times, but they were happy ones. OK, maybe the the New York Times critic wasn't impressed, mumbling that it was a 'sincere, but sloppy' directorial debut by Hoffman. But this is the Diary, and I was impressed. And even if the film went to DVD only a few months after its release in January of this year, in box office returns in the USA it handsomely recovered multiples of its costs.

It also won for its director the Best Narrative Feature at the Chicago International Film Festival, Breakthrough Directing at the Hollywood Film Festival, and one of the top ten independent films in the National Board of Review in the USA. Maggie Smith was nominated for a Golden Globe, and Billy Connolly for a British Independent Film Award as Best Supporting Actor.

Highly recommended. I'll probably watch it again (any good excuse to light a fire on a windy winter night and open a bottle of Australian red ... and be helped to feel happy).