Ordinary Love review – realistic cancer drama might be too ordinary

Though the movies constantly set out to convince us that love is some epic, swooning, time-spanning, musically-backed thing built on high romance and quotable one-liners, in reality it’s probably a bit closer to the habitual and boring day-to-day companionship depicted in a film like Ordinary Love. In this case, “ordinary” is right: this quiet drama from director team Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, based on script by playwright Owen McCafferty, is about as unassuming as cinema gets: its more dramatic moments involve an argument over parking and – brace yourself – a trip to the supermarket.

The film finds its story in the plight faced by Tom (Liam Neeson) and Joan (Leslie Manville), a retired couple living a happy but unremarkable life in Belfast, whose little world is turned upside down when Joan receives a breast cancer diagnosis after finding a lump in the shower. There tend to be two types of film about cancer: the exploitive and saccharine kind, whereby the notion of a terminal disease is pulled out to tug on your heartstrings and manipulate your feelings, and the kind like Ordinary People, in which cancer is treated with the respect it deserves and handled in a way that only ever feels like real life.

It’s in these moments that the film works best – in its well-observed depictions of going through the process of being diagnosed from the perspective of two people who only have each other. McCaffery’s script captures the slow and uneasy feeling of taking tests and waiting for results, and he displays a talent for minutiae in both the hospital setting and at home. This is a film that captures an ageing couple in a way that only ever feels honest. They eat, for example, with the lights off, and tease one another with in-jokes that aren’t necessarily funny to us but have clearly been said and resaid for years and years. Of course, a film like Ordinary Love only works if we believe that the couple are really a couple, and in Tom and Joan’s case it’s never in doubt. Rare, too, is it that we get to see a couple in their sixties having sex on screen, and Ordinary People doesn’t shy away from these aspects but admirably chooses to embrace them.

It is elegantly shot and tightly scripted, though the pace flounders somewhat in the final act and tonally we hit a slight snag when Joan meets a fellow cancer patient – a teacher named Peter (David Wilmot) – who has been diagnosed as terminal. Suddenly the film trades its prior nuance for a pandering storyline that seems more heavy-handed and atypical of a less subtle film.

What cannot be denied is the strength of Leslie Manville’s committed performance. Here she paints a portrait of a very normal and likeable woman not all that different from her character in brilliant BBC sitcom Mum. Neeson also impresses as Tom, a dedicated husband who is trying – and occasionally failing – to keep it together for the both of them. When Joan accuses him of being selfish we aren’t sure if this is actually true, and Neeson – ever the enigma – hints at both possibilities (though a later scene in which he smokes a cigarette suggests there is a more complicated character beneath the surface). Yet in its push to depict such a colourless existence, the film’s biggest strength also turns out to be its biggest weakness; these people and their lives are so ordinary – and so thinly-drawn – that you might come away wondering whether, cancer story aside, they deserved a film to begin with.

★★★☆☆

By: Tom Barnard

Get Ordinary Love showtimes in London.