Last Orders

WE SEE THEM evolve over time, which may be why movie actors are so easy to love. Attempts to formalize our affection for them on-screen, however, are usually strained. When filmmakers acknowledge a performer's legacy, it's often in a drippy way that conforms to our most Hallmark notions of how old age should be: think of Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn twinkling through soft-focus fog banks in On Golden Pond. Veteran male actors become insecure yet lovable codgers, when not fossilizing into crumbling granite memorials to their original appeal. The women are hustled into bitchy-quip kaffeeklatsches, when not simply put out to pasture. Aging itself is the antithesis of the glamour that still dominates cinema, even when it gestures toward realism; stories about depressed or misfit lives remain typically cast with good-looking young actors playing "against type," which softens their narrative blow.

Nonetheless, exceptions to all the above rules appear once or twice a season, and sometimes they're even good. Last Orders is a wistful codger-thon of the stripe that usually comes out a bit pat and self-congratulatory, à la Whales of August – Mount Rushmore movies, too deliberate in their bowing and scraping before very old iconic faces. Of course, the faces here aren't quite that old – at most tracing back to '60s cinema – and they're British, a factor that can indeed be counted on at times for useful ensemble restraint. Further, Last Orders is based on an excellent literary novel by Graham Swift. It's been adapted and directed by Australian Fred Schepisi, whose winding intercontinental career has usually made the best of eccentrically diverse circumstances (from The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith through Plenty, Roxanne, and Six Degrees of Separation). There's nothing groundbreaking, let alone remotely hip, about Last Orders; it's a well-crafted piece of work, full stop. Still, there are times when you have to cave to suspiciously Oscar-smelling criteria and admit that sheer thoughtful craftsmanship can be a value as gratitude-inspiring as any other.

Like Swift's prior novels Shuttlecock and Waterland – both previously made into interesting, not-at-all-dissimilar movies – Last Orders pieces together elaborate character back stories to explain a present moment's autumnal melancholy. The death – probably from cancer, though it's never mentioned – of "master butcher" Jack Dodds (Michael Caine) has pulled together his old drinking buddies one more time for a long day's traveling pub crawl and coastal ash-scattering. Jack's wife, Amy (Helen Mirren), is not present, having begged off to spend time with the now 50-year-old, long-institutionalized child he could never face as a father. But their adopted son, used-car dealer Vince (Ray Winstone), is along as designated driver, alongside divorced bookie Lucky (Bob Hoskins), undertaker Vic (Tom Courtenay), and failed boxer Lenny (David Hemmings), all Jack's mates from way back.

Last Orders is one of those films in which "nothing happens" in a chugging-narrative-engine, cathartic-explosion sense, yet everything is revealed – or perhaps just enough to leave you wanting more, wishing the characters might stick around for another round or three. Shooting in his customary wide-format, near-impersonal but incisive style, Schepisi resists indicating nostalgia or regret; they bleed right through the material on their own. That's no small achievement, since Swift's novel encompasses nearly six decades from multiple viewpoints. What must have been a hellishly difficult screenplay adaptation comes off without a hitch on-screen. Flashbacks all over the map from WW2 Egyptian-frontline camaraderie to last week's hospital deathwatch simply fit.

Better still, the movie has a generosity toward ordinary lives' accumulative errata that considers some quiet desperation as a given but refuses to admit that tragedy or transcendent uplift must then result. Working-class East Ender types who more or less made good or didn't quite, the characters here are still struggling with "issues" that never got much easier – relationships to children, money trouble, career roads not traveled – yet they get on. Their lack of neurosis is endearing, even noble.

Last Orders duly takes stock of its cast's sum screen-historical baggage, but checks it, and rides to its destination in bemused economy class. Once you get past those brick-thick undercaste accents – everything mmmph'd, whether they're finking abawt sumphing or whatever – the performances seem beautifully cogent. Caine reminds us what a stellar character actor he's been all along; Hoskins is Hoskins, only less so, which is an excellent thing; Mirren warms the drudge soup already stirred in Gosford Park; Winstone, one of those actors who flowered only when he lost his looks, is exquisitely put-upon. Made less use of but still welcome aboard are erstwhile Billy Liar's Courtenay, gone donnish and gentle, and the unrecognizable Hemmings, whose swinging London photographer in Blowup is now buried beneath troll layers of flab, furry-caterpillar eyebrows, and nicotine croakage.

The actors who play their younger selves are perfect – beautiful yet not demonstrably "better," green and vulnerable. In a movie where time travels vertically – always moving, always grounded – the only element of banal stasis lies in Paul Grabowsky's score, which too often sounds like elevator music without the actual lift. Otherwise, this immensely satisfying seriocomedy knows just what floor you want.