Song For Marion
Unfinished Song

Song for Marion is a small British movie about death and community singing. That combination should make for either a total disaster or wonderful surprise, but in this case it’s merely a serviceable drama. Terence Stamp plays a grumpy old man whose wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave, is dying of cancer.  She refuses to quit partaking in a community choir of old age pensioners lead by a spunky twenty-something, played by Gemma Arterton. Stamp doesn’t approve of the choir but wants his wife to be happy in her final months and so an uneasy tension is created between the three leads. For the most part, this film avoids going the expected way of so many cutesy British comedies about old people and instead concentrates on being a straightforward character study and an engaging examination of how impending death affects a long-lived marriage. The film provides plenty of opportunities for Stamp and Redgrave to use their unique talents in subtle and delicate ways.

However, this is the type of picture that holds no surprises for an audience. Since we know what will happen at every point in the story, a film like this must not only have extraordinary performances, it can not have any false moments to break its tenuous hold on us. Stamp and Redgrave are both wonderful actors and cherished old-school movie stars so they do make the movie worth seeing, but writer/director Paul Andrew Williams makes several major missteps in the film’s third act. By failing to make the conflict between Stamp and his estranged son (Christopher Eccleston) feel fully credible, and by overplaying every aspect of the film’s inevitable climax, Williams commits the cardinal sin of small British movies.  Showing less always shows so much more in these films.