Witty one-liners aside, this is a rather gauche and unexciting film. Peter O’Toole, having been relegated to absurdly underdeveloped roles in the past two decades, is finally given another chance to shine…as a perverted and impotent old man, a trained stage actor, who is now resigned to playing corpses in hospital melodramas. He lusts after a friend’s tart niece, whose foul mouth hides a soul driven by overblown aspirations and loneliness. She is abandoned by her parents in the heart of England, and then again by her elderly uncle; when she and O’Toole’s Maurice find one another, she is looking for monetary comfort and in-studio connections, while he searches for an escape from his daunting age. At first she comes off as petty and materialistic, even attacking the old man when he cannot afford to buy her clothes; conversely, he watches her pose nude for an art class and is given rewards in the form of neck-kisses. Everything is intended to make the film seem atypical—two lonesome people who cannot fall in love, cannot have sex, yet live in a world of odd eroticism. But as the film draws to an end, it becomes what it hopes to avoid—an emotional nugget of clichés. O’Toole’s Maurice, a role meant to satirize the late careers of great stage actors, becomes just another wise old man who must pass on for the film’s message to come through. Just another man in a hospital bed with people crying around him.
But even with such an odd film, I can’t help but feel that O’ Toole was robbed of a golden statuette…again.
by Adam Balz | Source: Miramax DVD
28 Jun 2007 10:15 PM | Submit Comment
