Today a report is being published by a Parliamentary Committee about the social consequences of people living longer. Apparently the report estimates that someone born in 2007 in the U.K. is likely to live until they are a hundred. So the elderly are in the news again. But not only in the news – on the screen as well. There have been three recent films in the cinemas, about and presumably designed to attract, the ‘grey pound’. We have seen each of them. The first was ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ , about the adventures of a group of old people played by much loved British actors who move to an Indian retirement home.
The second was ‘Quartet’ with again a selection of favourite actors performing as onetime professional musicians and singers living in a care home exclusively designed for them. Very good ensemble playing, with for me a delightful performance by Tom Courtenay. Last night we saw the third of these films about people struggling with old age : ‘Song for Marion’ with stand-out performances from Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp, but otherwise hampered by a poor screenplay and the waste of Christopher Ecceleston.
The first two films were played for laughs and sentiment and the music in ‘Quartet’ was superbe, but I found the third film maudlin and unconvincing, and am surprised that most of the reviews were kind in an indulgent sort of way. ‘These grey-pound grabbers’ said one reviewer, ‘have largely inhabited the same stifling tonal range: somewhere between cute and cosy, as though the target audience were incapable of processing anything challenging at 2pm on a wet Wednesday and prefer to be tickled under the chin for 90 minutes’. That’s how I certainly felt about ‘Song of Marion’ – which we saw at 3.p.m. on a Monday afternoon! It was clichéd and patronising, and when I was moved with a death as one is by any death and the attempt to come to terms with it for the survivors, I felt I was being used by the film.
Each film tried to portray older people as still being able to enjoy themselves, which is good! So much of the media coverage of age is about disappointment and struggle. There’s plenty of that, and I may be so downbeat in these blogs that I endorse such a simplistic caricature, and if that is so I regret it. I haven’t quite got to the stage of counting my blessings so that they outweigh the disadvantages of age, but I’m on that road. I think what all of us should resist – fight against – is the idea that each of us can be described entirely in terms of being old. We may be ‘pensioners’ and ‘grey pound grabbers’ but more than either, we are people.
Bryan
