Distributor:
AV Channel-Madman Certificate: M15
Available to Rent
ANYONE
IN IT WE KNOW?
Campbell
Scott, Hope Davis, Denis Leary
WHAT’S
IT ABOUT THEN?
The
fourth and final season of
classic seventies drama When The
Boat Comes In made some four
years after the third season,
Jack Ford returns from America
where he has been involving in
several underhand deals
including running bootleg
liquor, the Wall Street Crash of
1929 has left him down on his
luck and out to salvage some of
his former life back.
SO
IS IT ANY GOOD?
This
low key US drama starts off slow and sort of slackens off a bit from
there, it completely drags you in though with its deceptively simple
story of Dentist David Hurst (Campbell Scott) who discovers his fellow
dentist wife (Davis) is having an affair and slowly crumbles as he is
unwilling to confront her because if he does things will change for ever
and if he doesn't she might just get over it and life can carry on as
normal. All well and ordinary you might say but director Alan Rudolph
cleverly introduces the always fantastic Denis Leary as a disgruntled
patient of Hurst's who ends up becoming his imaginary inner conscience
popping up at the most unlikely and inconvenient moments to offer
straight down the barrel advice. This clever touch, along
with
numerous other little sequences and motifs really go a long way to
adding to the power of the film.
Based
on the novella The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley The Secret Lives of
Dentists feels real and makes you invest in it emotionally, you do care
about the characters by the movies end and want Hurst to stop drowning
in his own fear and re-communicate with his wife. A genuinely affecting
movie for adults which is something of a rarity these days.
