The Old Man and the Land
Just one actor dominates the screen in director Nicholas Parish’s notably adventurous and individual film debut.
Image courtesy of Reason8 Films.
This fascinating film marks the feature debut of Nicholas Parish, an artist of many skills. He first turned his attention to sculpture and to furniture design before becoming established as a maker of music videos, short films and commercials and then moved into television including the miniseries Immortality. Only now, working closely with the writer Nico Mensinga, has he given us a feature film for the cinema and has done so with a piece that is notably adventurous and individual. Indeed, The Old Man and the Land could be described as an experiment, possibly one encouraged by the success of Steven Knight’s Locke (2013). That film dared to confine itself visually to one man in a car. It was a drama that played out with all the other characters unseen but heard in phone conversations with the driver played by Tom Hardy. The Old Man and the Land also features just one man who is seen on screen, a father played by Roger Marten, whose adult children – David (Rory Kinnear) and Laura (Emily Beecham) – are heard on the soundtrack but do not actually appear. But there is one major difference from the set-up in Locke in that here the person seen never speaks. That makes The Old Man and the Land even more difficult to bring off, but despite falling short of complete success there is a great deal here that deserves not just admiration but applause.
What emerges is a tale portraying the history of one family over several generations as revealed over a relatively short period of time. The father of Laura and David never seems to answer their phone calls but we hear the messages that they leave and quickly realise that there is conflict over the future of the land that he farms. A widower, he works the land in his old-fashioned way refusing to face up to its decline and the debts incurred. Laura is his older child – she is now forty-two and is currently working on a farm in Spain – and his son, David, an alcoholic, is thirty-nine. It soon becomes apparent that Laura having grown to love the land in her childhood would really wish to be in charge of the family farm but is aware that because David is a man he is more likely than she is to be made the heir despite his inadequacies. But in any case, the stubborn father even when pressured tends to put off a final decision on this point.
It is this situation which dominates during the first half of The Old Man and the Land. Because it is the future of the farm, if not its very survival, that is in question, the film’s unusual approach works well. If the words that we hear reveal the personal tensions involved, the images of the countryside and of the daily rigours of farm work create a meaningful counterpart, one that gives us simultaneously the conflict and the very thing that that conflict is about. It would not be truly effective but for the fact that Nico Mensinga’s screenplay is so deeply persuasive and characterful and so superbly voiced by Rory Kinnear and Emily Beecham. And, while what we hear is all taking place in the present, we are able to realise from that how past history within the family has influenced the two siblings in their relationships with each other and with their father. We realise too how all this is a consequence of the father’s own experiences and how he had been treated and shaped in his early days. Everything comes fully alive in a way that makes it easy for viewers to identify with the various family issues that emerge.
However, if the stylisation adopted is often surprisingly effective, it also has its limitations when the film breaks the rules that it has created for itself. Those seeming rules do admit of some bending. If we have become adjusted to words only heard in phone messages, it's not too difficult to accept voice-overs by both Laura and David which actually go beyond that and suggest monologues about themselves. It's even possible to accept at one point an implied connection between a phone message from a car and shots of a car seen in misty conditions which could be the vehicle containing David and Laura, the latter having come over on a visit from Spain. But it becomes distracting when the calls are not to their father in the country. Thus to have a call between the siblings themselves at some other location including a reference to being somewhere referred to as "here" is at odds with the continued rural images that accompany these words. In the same way we later have a call by Laura to her lawyer for which what we see seems somewhat inappropriate.
But, if the film still works well for the most part despite these inconsistent touches, the second half of The Old Man and the Land feels decidedly less adept. The narrative moves into fresh areas with an unexpected development in David's life and a significant episode in which we hear him attending an AA group and declaring that he has been sober for 96 days. Old history regarding the father’s treatment of his wife in her lifetime and David's reaction to his father's actions at her funeral become more and more a key focus. Despite a seeming resolution of the future of the land which occurs around the film’s midpoint, that issue is not entirely done with but even so the drama has largely moved away from it. It is significant that a climactic moment involves not a phone message but a letter written by David to his father and the question that lingers is whether or not mistakes made by one generation are indeed destined to be repeated or can be repudiated Such material is rich but not best handled in the manner adopted here. The first half of The Old Man and the Land triumphs against the odds but thereafter it increasingly becomes a story that would work better if told in a more conventional style. Nevertheless, even if the film comes to seem decidedly imperfect, there is much here that is deeply impressive including the admirable rural photography by Parish himself. It's certainly enough to make this an unusual piece worthy of your attention.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Rory Kinnear, Emily Beecham and Roger Marten.
Dir Nicholas Parish, Pro Josh Eve, Anneli Flexman and Nicholas Parish, Screenplay Nico Mensinga, from a story by Nico Mensinga and Nicholas Parish, Ph Nicholas Parish, Ed Nicholas Parish and Ben Taylor, Music Evelyn Sykes.
Milkwood Productions/Eve’ll Films-Reason8 Films.
100 mins. UK. 2023. UK Rel: 20 September 2024. Cert. 15.
