Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville star as a married couple facing a crisis in this intimate and stark drama.
Image provided by LFF
Tom (Neeson) and Joan (Manville) are a middle-aged couple quietly enjoying life together in their humble home. When Joan is diagnosed with breast cancer, the two go through the motion of taking every step to ensure Joan’s recovery, doing their best to handle whatever the immediate future throws at them.
Taking place over the course of a year, Ordinary Love is a film that proves to be very meticulous in expressing what a couple goes through when faced with such an ordeal. Tom and Joan could be your aunt or uncle, or even you parents, that’s how recognisable their very human characterisations are, and how beautifully handled Neeson and Manville’s performances are.
As such, the drama here feels incredibly real, and that makes for some tough watching at a number of points. Tom and Joan have a relationship that appears very playful and filled with a genuine care and affection, something which seems to have been only strengthened by a past tragedy. The level of affection sometimes gives way to anger and annoyance as they work through the motions of treating Joan, but they always return to a place of kindness and warmth that help this strikingly real drama play with more warmth than it does an overbearing bleakness.
Having two actors like Neeson and Manville as your leads certainly goes a long way to enabling this drama to land with the requisite level of feeling. So many cancer dramas opt to use the illness as an easy way to exploit an audience’s sense of empathy, but the care and attention given to these characters and to making their surroundings feel as real as possible allows this film to stand as more of a tapestry of a particular experience of a recognizable couple going through an all too relatable situation.
Every now and again, the film slightly overplays its hand stylistic when it is largely going for a grounded approach, with a real infatuation for the colour blue dominating throughout the drama. But it works as a piece of cathartic cinema displaying the range of emotions that it is perfectly ok to feel when going through such a situation, a situation which throws up all manner of questions around mortality. The film manages to just about walk that line where it manages to feel more worthwhile rather than exploitative when it comes to dealing with cancer as its subject. An understated, exceptionally performed look at a very real relationship going through one of the hardest times a couple can go through.
Ordinary Love will be released on 6th December 2019.
