Movie review: IS ANYBODY THERE?
Michael Caine faces death in IS ANYBODY THERE?
John Crowley’s Is Anybody There? really packs it in. Crowley and scripter Peter Harness have tried to amalgamate a lot of scenes that are serially, and sometimes almost simultaneously, intended to register vulgarly mordant humor, dreary Brit-kitsch kitchen sink drama, piercingly poignant human dilemmas and delicate philosophical insights. As might be expected, the filmmakers’ attempts to bundle all this together are sometimes awkward and arbitrary.
What’s surprising is how well they get away with it. The most important reasons are the performances of Michael Caine and young Bill Milner and their unexpectedly appealing and affecting teamwork. Caine’s performance might seem to be the vital force in this essentially slight and uneven film, and it is, but it is designed to work in tandem with Milner’s Edward. To the extent a point of view prevails in the picture, it’s the boy’s.
Caine’s Clarence is a used-up music-hall magician sent by social workers in 1987 to lodge at the seniors boarding house run by Edward’s parents (Anne Marie Duff and David Morrisey) near the English shore. Waspishly embittered and dismayed to find himself in this less than genteel, sometimes disturbing group setting, Clarence is ill-disposed to deal graciously with a ten-year-old boy who resents being displaced from his room, first by the lately deceased previous occupant and now by the old magician.
