Review: On a Clear Day

There are some films that adhere so closely to type that you know everything about them the moment the trailer has ended: characters, relationships, goals, dreams -- all are revealed in those two minutes. And you know, too, if this is a movie you want to see because it will move you to tears with its well-loved cliches, or if those same cliches will fill you with rage, and you need to avoid it like the plague. Gaby Dellal’s On a Clear Day is one of those films.

If you’ve seen The Full Monty, you’ve seen On a Clear Day. Hell, if you’ve seen Brassed Off, you’ve seen it. Or even Calendar Girls. Like those films, it’s just what it appears to be: a heart-warming story about someone who is hit with bad news, and hatches a crazy plan which, though he might not know it at the time, will restore not just his self-worth, but also the love of his drifting, distant family. It’s never surprising, but it doesn’t want to be; in fact, the whole thing is shamelessly tear-jerking and cliched, and also, impossibly, immensely likable.

In the case of Dellal’s film, the bad news is redundancy, specifically that imposed upon 55-year-old Frank Redmond (the note-perfect Peter Mullan) who is laid off from his work as a shipbuilder after decades of commitment. At his age, Redmond’s life has become a well-defined series of daily rituals: he goes to work, to the community pool, and then home to his wife (Brenda Blethyn, reliable as always), and his comfortable, virtually silent marriage. When one part of his routine is taken away, everything goes awry. Redmond tries to hold on to normalcy by making daily trips to the pool, but he’s completely unsettled and suffers from frightening panic attacks. Adding to Redmond’s stress is the growing distance between himself and his grown son, Rob (Jamie Sives), whose closeness to his own twin boys is a constant reminder of how strained relations are between the two older men.

Not normally effusive, Redmond becomes even quieter and more introverted as a result of his converging crises. Though in other movies things might continue to spiral downward, because this one is a decedent of The Full Monty, we as an audience simply wait, smiling slightly, for Redmond to find his Goal -- the one thing that will bring an end to his depression, renew his confidence and, inexplicably, win him the love of his family. On a Clear Day doesn’t disappoint: after a boring, depressing “booze cruise” with his aggressively motley crew of confidants and a test swim in a local river, Redmond announces that he’s going to swim the English Channel. And that his wife and son must not know. Obviously.

From here on, everyone remotely interested in On a Clear Day knows how it will end, and it’s that very predictability that both fills theater seats and drives other filmgoers away: it’s both a weakness and a strength. Apart from its predictability, though, there are other problems with the film, and these are not so easily overlooked. The humor is incredibly irregular, veering from a typically low-key style to slapstick physicality and scatological humor. The latter are so jarring to the film’s crucial rhythm that it’s almost embarrassing -- the audience I saw it with responded with stunned silence, and some uncomfortable shifting in seats. Along similar lines, the presence of Billy Boyd as Danny is completely unnecessary. His character, who feels as if he’s just arrived from a much hipper, faster movie, is the source of the film’s most jarring moments, and one increasingly suspects that he was cast almost entirely in the hope that his presence would bring Lord of the Rings fans to the theater.

An additional major flaw in the film is its heavy-handedness, which is all the more noticeable because, despite its cliches, much of On a Clear Day is surprisingly subtle. Mixed in with small, wordless exchanges and tiny smiles that speak (cliched) volumes, however, are sudden, totally inappropriate long speeches that lay out, point by point, all of the emotions and thoughts that have already been made plain in the quiet scenes. It’s both irritating and, more importantly, damaging to the power of film. Like the unfunny attempts at humor, these speeches derail the movie temporarily, and are so ham-handed that even the most willing of viewers (and I include myself in that group) can’t help but be disappointed.

The thing is, though, despite its gleefully pedestrian story and a script that seems to have very little sense of its own tone, the film is still remarkably effective, deriving more power than it deserves to wield from the performance of Mullan as Redmond. In the kind of older man, suffering-terribly-but-repressing-his-emotions role that people like Stellan Skarsgård and Daniel Auteuil play so well, Mullan is wonderful. He throws himself into a character we’ve all see dozens of times and enthusiastically makes it his own.

Even the most shopworn moments -- the silent, longing looks at his wife, the shock at rejection by his son -- are filled with real emotion, and are as affecting as if they were brand new. There is one scene in particular, when Redmond’s son walks away from him on a bridge at midday, that perfectly captures Mullan’s performance: he hardly does a thing, but with millimeters of movement, his face collapses, and the hardest, toughest man on earth looks suspiciously like a lost child. Yet another cliché, sure. But Mullan knows it is, and doesn’t care. He does it perfectly, and the moment is heart-breaking, and utterly convincing. At that moment, he picks up the formulaic movie and its uneven script and puts it on his back, and it’s a great pleasure just watching him work.