Closing the Ring
Closing the Ring certainly has a fine cinematic pedigree. With a cast led by Oscar winners Shirley MacLaine and Brenda Fricker, directed by the man who brought us Gandhi, and with young TV stars such as Mischa Barton and Gregory Smith playing older characters in WWII flashback, it definitely appeals to several different film audiences. But what makes this special is its cross-channel appeal, including the best depiction of Northern Ireland I have seen in a modern film.
It centers on the connection between a plane crash that happened in Belfast in 1944 and the impact this crash still has on people in Michigan and Belfast in 1991. The film begins in Michigan at the funeral of Chuck Harris, husband to Ethel Ann (MacLaine), father to Marie (Neve Campbell, in a thankless yet crucial role) and best friend of Jack (Christopher Plummer). Simultaneously, in Belfast, Jimmy Reilly (Martin McCann) joins Michael Quinlan (Pete Postlethwaite) on a mountain above the city, where there’s an excellent view of explosions below and it’s not just the remains of the plane that lie buried.
The spooling between WWII and 1991, Belfast and Michigan, takes place seamlessly thanks to crisp cinematography by Roger Pratt, no-nonsense editing by Lesley Walker, and restrained but effective use of CGI. The major emotional moments come between young Ethel (Barton), young Jack (Smith), Chuck (David Alpay) and Teddy (Stephen Amell). Strangely, this is also the film’s weakest point, when we’re told, not shown, that the whole town is in love with Ethel. Barton’s self-contained poise shines through, even in her nude scenes, but her relationship with these young men needed a stronger start. That said, what they have is enough to, in a wedding scene, cause the most crying I have ever heard from an English cinema audience.
How the stories come together is cleverly handled, and none of the coincidences in Peter Woodward’s screenplay stretch credulity. But what really works are the relationships between Jimmy and his grandmother Eleanor (Fricker) and Quinlan – whose younger selves also have a crucial wartime flashback scene. McCann, with close Irish features transformed by a beaming smile, gives a charming performance in his film debut. At one stage he is picked up and interrogated by the police about a discovery he makes on the mountain. If he says what he knows, he will certainly be murdered by the IRA; if he refuses to, the threats made against his family are not idle. The brilliance is that this is handled matter-of-factly, rather than as a shocking twist. Finally, Belfast is just another film setting.
Even if the film wasn’t inspired by a real plane crash, Belfast is the perfect setting to show how buried secrets can poison everything. As a widow refusing to grieve, MacLaine makes it easy to see how Ethel’s refusal to let go has kept her trapped in the past. Fricker is her opposite, a cheerful woman without regrets who has loved often and unwisely. And has Plummer or Postlethwaite ever given a bad performance? Attenborough is no auteur, as he says himself, but his ability to enable his actors to shine makes Closing the Ring a film which really grows on you.
© 2007 Sarah Manvel. All rights reserved.
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