The Great Escaper: A wonderful old-fashioned movie, in the best sense
As I watched The Great Escaper, I thought of the likes of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn entertaining us in what seems like the distant past. In 2024, it’s Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson – the final film for each.
What’s the result when you put a film camera in front of a pair of dual Oscar winners who have more than a century of filmmaking between them? A wonderful old-fashioned movie, in the best sense of that phrase.
As I watched The Great Escaper, I thought of the likes of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn entertaining us in what seems like the distant past.
In 2024, it’s Michael Caine (debut film Morning Departure in 1950) and Glenda Jackson (debut film This Sporting Life in 1963).
It’s the final film for each. Jackson died in June 2023, aged 87. Her Oscars were for Women in Love (1971) and A Touch of Class (1974). Caine, who turns 91 on March 14, has announced his retirement. His Oscars were for Hannah and Her Sisters (1987) and The Cider House Rules (2000).
This drama is based on the true story of Bernie Jordan (Caine), an 89-year-old Royal Navy veteran who went absent without leave from a care home because he wanted to go to Normandy for the 70th commemoration of the D-Day landings, in which he took part.
He left behind his wife of near 70 years, Irene (Jackson), who urged him to go. When news of his plan emerged, after local police tweeted an alert, the media jumped onto the story. The Daily Mail conjured the headline The Great Escaper.
This movie is directed by British filmmaker Oliver Parker, who has made adaptations of the works of Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. This time around, he is closer to his 2016 film Dad’s Army, based on the television 1968-77 sitcom of the same name. For while this is a poignant story, it is also a humorous one.
“Are you all right?’’ Bernie asks Rene, as he calls her, early on. “No, I am not,’’ she replies, but with a smile. “I’m bloomin’ old.”
It opens with the couple, each armed with a walking stick, managing their little lives in the home. Later, it’s Rene who touches on this idea, of having a little life, in a beautiful way.
Caine and Jackson are brilliant. It’s not the first time they have played husband and wife. That was in Joseph Loosey’s 1975 romantic-drama The Romantic Englishman.
This is a quiet film in which the main characters say less but think more. The veterans, including the Germans Bernie meets in the place he once fought them, all have untold stories.
The cinematography (Christopher Ross) supports this in starkly beautiful scenes: Bernie alone and silent on the beaches of Normandy; Bernie and a Royal Air Force bombardier (an impressive John Standing) he has befriended standing mute in the Bayeux cemetery (almost 5000 British dead).
Bernie’s 2014 time in Normandy is juxtaposed, via flashbacks, to the time he was there in 1944. Will Fletcher is the young Bernie. The beach landing scenes are gripping. Laura Marcus is the young Rene he falls in love with before he departs.
One part of Bernie’s story is straightforward. It made headlines. The challenge for British scriptwriter William Ivor was to expand the story by imagining what drove Bernie to make the trip. He does so in a way that may not be that dramatic but I think it’s believable.
One of the themes of this movie is old age, from which there is no escape. Unless of course you don’t make it that far, as so many didn’t between 1939 and 1945.
For that reason, it in tandem explores – particularly through Jackson’s superb performance as Rene – the privilege of making it to old age, especially with someone you love.
When the home staff express their concerns about Bernie’s escapade to Rene, she brushes it off. He has crossed the channel before, she tells them, “only then they were shooting at him”.
The Great Escaper (M)
96 minutes
In cinemas
★★★½
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Andrew Scott’s solo performance is astounding
If you’re a fan of Irish actor Andrew Scott, best known as the good-looking priest in the second season of television series Fleabag (2019), drop everything and take yourself to Vanya.
Scott plays all the characters, male and female, in this radical interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s 1897 play Uncle Vanya and the result is jaw-dropping.
He captures the full sweep of human life in this solo performance, seamlessly moving from one character to another to another to another.
He shows us love, heartbreak, erotic passion, humility, arrogance, timidity, jealousy, frustration, anger and much more, while also bringing to life Chekhov’s timeless sense of humour.
This is a film of Scott doing the play at the National Theatre in London. It is part of the must-watch NT Live series, which includes Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s stage production of Fleabag.
If you do explore the backlist, do not miss Frankenstein, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller.
The co-creators of this stage adaptation of Chekhov’s tragicomedy, which sold out on its London run, are Scott, the director Sam Yates, playwright Simon Stephens and designer Rosanna Vize.
The screen director is Matthew Amos, who brings his own talents to this stage-to-screen production.
It’s much more than a play being filmed.
He frames the film so that we see it differently than if we were sitting in the theatre.
There are moments where Scott looks into the camera. We see him cry in close-ups. And as we don’t always see the whole stage, it feels like he is talking to other actors who are out of our line of sight. That’s how good he is. Even better, though, is when he switches from one character to another. He uses simple props – a cigarette, a tea towel, a tennis ball, a necklace – to mark each one, but it’s his face and voice that does the real transformation.
This idea of one actor playing every character is not new. Kip Williams’ adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, starring Eryn-Jean Norvill in Sydney and Sarah Snook in London, is extraordinary. In July he will do the same with Dracula, starring Zahra Newman.
Unlike Williams’ adaptations, Vanya does not use video, other digital additions or costume changes. It is just an actor on the stage, dressed the same from start to finish.
The basic story is Chekhov’s: Aleksandr, married to a much younger second wife, Helena, announces he plans to sell the rural estate that has been run by his late first wife’s brother, Vanya, for 25 years.
This adaptation is not set in Russia and the time is not the 19th century but nowish. Aleksandr is not a professor but a critically lauded filmmaker who is down on his luck.
The script is full of one-liners that play to this new setting. “He’s never had an original idea in his life,’’ Vanya says of Aleksandr. “His only successful films were adaptations.”
Every moment of Scott’s performance is worth watching. If I had to pick a highlight sequence it starts when he is Sonya, Vanya’s “plain-looking” niece, and Mikhail, the handsome country doctor who visits the estate every day. She goes close to telling him, in a schoolgirl way, that she is in love with him. He responds politely.
Next, Sonya and Helena talk about the doctor. The beautiful Helena knows why he visits but she promises to ask him if he likes Sonya “as a woman”.
She talks to the doctor, who is head-over-heels in love with her.
Scott moves between these four characters without a pause. Each of them is utterly believable. Each is in emotional pain, and you feel for them. What a role … what a performance … what an actor.
Vanya (MA15+)
120 minutes
In cinemas
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