The Big Picture: Last Orders (15)

Another one for the road

This couldn't have been the easiest pitch of the movie year. Four geezers from Bermondsey drive through a damp Kent countryside, bickering and boozing at various stops while they each privately recall memories from as distant as 50 years back. They reach Margate pier on a sullen grey afternoon and proceed to tip ashes into the sea. And that's it. Perhaps when confidence was wobbling the producers may have considered slapping a new title on it – "Four Go Mad in Margate", anyone? – but in the end they stuck to the sombre original. And Last Orders, from its title onwards, turns out to pack more significance than first meets the eye.

The film is based on the 1996 Booker prize-winning novel by Graham Swift, an intricate patchwork of national history and personal remembrance couched in the gruff demotic of working-class south Londoners. It's primarily a "voice" book, not the sort of thing film generally has much use for, yet director Fred Schepisi has not merely written a decent adaptation, he has also found the key to what might have been an awkward translation. The film, a muted tribute to a certain type of Englishness, is, not coincidentally, a glory of English casting; there aren't "star turns" in Last Orders, just ensemble acting of tremendous subtlety and restraint. Some of the names will be familiar, some not, but the standard of the playing is of a uniformly high order.

The story concerns various journeys, and opens, appropriately enough, in a pub called The Coach and Horses. Ray (Bob Hoskins), Vic (Tom Courtenay) and Lenny (David Hemmings) have gathered for a pint prior to fulfilling the last request of their late friend Jack (Michael Caine) – to have his ashes scattered off Margate pier. Their driver is Jack's son Vince (Ray Winstone), a used car-dealer with a bit more juice in his tank than the three oldsters, though by no means as cockily self-assured as he'd like to appear. Off they go in a gleaming Mercedes borrowed for the day from Vince's showroom, with an urn of ashes and some private ghosts of their own to lay to rest.

The central strut of the narrative is the relationship between Ray and Jack's wife Amy (Helen Mirren), who once had a brief affair back in the Sixties. Ray, a thoughtful, kindly foil to Jack's abrasive bonhomie, understands Amy in a way her husband never could, in particular the lifelong strain of the mentally handicapped daughter whom Amy visits each week and Jack refused to talk about. Now, with the latter on his death-bed, Ray has to find a way of delivering Amy from the shady creditors Jack got himself in hock to, and it could depend on Ray's legendary luck with the horses to save them. The scene in which Caine and Hoskins arrange this deal, in broken hospital whispers, crystallises a pathos that has been accruing by degrees, for the film is basically a rotating sequence of flashbacks to the dim and distant.

In another's hands this structure might have been fragmentary and confusing; Schepisi keeps a firm hold, however, and with the help of his casting directors (Patsy Pollock, Shaheen Baig) he has matched up the lead characters beautifully with actors impersonating their younger selves. JJ Feild as Jack and Anatol Yusef as Ray are entirely credible as rookie soldiers made fast friends in the crucible of war, while the young Lenny looks so eerily like the older man that it was a relief to find that the role was actually played by Hemmings's son, Nolan. Kelly Reilly as the young Amy doesn't really fit looks-wise with Helen Mirren, but she catches her shyly flirtatious manner. There's something else going on, too, in the resonances that haunt the stars from keynote roles of the past: Caine sounds a lot like Alfie might have done thirty years on, and is there not a poignancy in comparing the David Hemmings of Blow-Up (1966) with his pouchy, weathered older self here? Even watching Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren reminiscing by the river Thames takes one back 20 years to their mobster and moll in The Long Good Friday.

The overlay of past on present is apparent in a larger way; the journey to Margate becomes a pilgrimage as the four men stop to ponder the Naval memorial at Chatham, and later wander around the stone effigies of Canterbury Cathedral.

As Ray takes a quiet moment, the camera rises up to dwarf him, the brief candle of a life still flickering in the gloom. That Last Orders is in part a tragicomedy of old age is underscored by Brian Tufano's eloquent, unaffected photography, which catches the pallid, grey flesh of pensionable fellows, blotchy with the booze of a thousand lock-ins.

Ray and Vic are growing old gracefully; Lenny, however, who failed to make the grade as a boxer, can't help thinking he's still good for a fight, and finally needles Vince into responding. That the men scuffle on the site of the hop field where Jack first met Amy is another reminder of the past's insistent shadow on the present. Schepisi's feel for the material is remarkably assured, and its elegiac mood is well-suited to the winter season. Perhaps too well-suited: I'm not sure that many filmgoers under the age of 25 will be eagerly awaiting a tale of baffled hopes among people old enough to be their grandparents. Road Trip this most certainly ain't. Yet its contemplation of friendship, love and self-sacrifice should find an audience, and indeed deserves one; the cinema of understatement and nuance has been paid a handsome due. Last Orders isn't grim; rather, it takes a melancholy view of human transience, and suggests a universal desire for the same thing Ray and Vic and Lenny want, intoned at the end of every night, in every pub: Time, please.