Written by Owen McCafferty 
Directed by  Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn
Starring Lesley Manville, Liam Neeson, David Wilmot and Amit Shah
MPAA rating: R for brief sexuality/nudity
Running time: 1 hour and 32 minutes

by Fiona Underhill

Northern Irish filmmaking duo Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn have taken on the teen road-trip movie in Cherrybomb (2009, starring Rupert Grint and Robert Sheehan) and the Belfast punk-rock scene in Good Vibrations (2012, starring Jodie Whittaker, Liam Cunningham and Adrian Dunbar). Now, they take a much more stripped-back, intimate and quiet approach in this portrayal of an older couple – Joan (Lesley Manville) and Tom (Liam Neeson) dealing with Joan’s diagnosis of breast cancer. This is Ordinary Love.

Liam Neeson’s career has followed an extremely unusual path, from the Oscar-nominated heights of Schindler’s List in 1993, continuing with relatively ‘high-brow’ fare in Nell, Rob Roy, Michael Collins, Gangs of New York and Kinsey, while mixing it up with appearances in the Star Wars prequels and The Dark Knight Trilogy. His career took a hard-left turn in 2008 (when he was 56) with Taken, which improbably turned him into an action star. He has returned to the realm of the more critically-acclaimed in recent years with Silence, Widows and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Now aged 67, Neeson is showing no signs of slowing down, with ten upcoming projects listed on his IMDb. Tom in Ordinary Love is the sort of role you might expect someone of Neeson’s age to be taking on, as he is retired and resisting the attempts made by his wife that they eat healthily and exercise. 

Lesley Manville is a distinguished actor of British stage and screen; she is best known for her work with Mike Leigh and she should have been an Oscar-winner for her Mrs Danvers-like role as Woodcock’s sister Cyril in Phantom Thread (2017). She is predictably phenomenal here as Joan, going through a transformative physical arc, as she has to start chemotherapy and experiences everything that entails.

Tom and Joan lead an extremely ‘ordinary’ life, apart from the fact that they had a daughter who died. However, we see the minutiae and routine of their everyday lives – Joan nagging Tom to take down the Christmas decorations, their daily walk around the same tree, how they have tea and split a scone. They are realistically portrayed as a couple who have been together for decades – the irritations, the bickering, the same stupid jokes. But it is obvious that they are still in love, would be lost without the other and still have desire for one another. The cancer diagnosis disrupts this routine – now there are long hospital visits and, as the chemotherapy progresses, Joan becomes confined to bed - shivering, sweating and vomiting.

The film is extremely well-written by playwright Owen McCafferty, making his debut in writing for the screen. So much is revealed in silent gestures and we quickly get to know our two central characters and their relationship well, through the use of “show don’t tell.” In the rare moments when Tom is home alone (because Joan has had to stay over in hospital), the disruption to his domestic life is revealed in tiny details, aided by the set decoration of Adrian Greenwood. The house is a comfortable cocoon for the couple, but it can quickly become nightmarish for both of them, such as when Joan must wear layers of clothing in bed and Tom can’t keep track of all of her medication.

One of the best aspects of Ordinary Love is the beautiful score by David Holmes and Brian Irvine, which uses the comforting repetition of notes at the start to lull us into a false sense of security, as we watch the couple’s daily rituals. Discordant notes reflect the tumult that comes into their lives once the diagnosis comes through. Like all aspects of the film, the score is not overly-emotional or sentimental, it is stripped-back and delicately balanced. The cinematography by Piers McGrail has an observational style, with lots of wide shots showing the spatial relationship between the central couple. There is some sense that we are removed at a distance, as a theatre audience would be. This means that when close-ups are used, for example in the two sex scenes, their intimacy is felt much more strongly. 

The only other two significant characters, other than Tom and Joan, are Peter (David Wilmot), an old primary school teacher of their daughter’s, who Joan bumps into in the hospital waiting room and his partner Steve (Amit Shah, who was in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s excellent comedy Crashing), who is dealing with Peter’s terminal diagnosis with avoidance. Peter becomes someone that Joan can confide in. The film is well structured, in that it takes place over the course of a year and small details reveal the passage of time. The blossoming of the tree that the couple walk around, the length of Joan’s hair as it gradually grows back a little, the Christmas decorations coming back out again. The other great way we see Joan’s character progression is how she goes from being someone new to cancer and chemotherapy, tentatively asking others what to expect to giving others advice, as a ‘seasoned pro.’ 

It is great to have a ‘small, ordinary’ film about a relationship that doesn’t go through the kind of extreme drama that you usually see in movies, but is about regular, everyday hardships that people experience. It is reminiscent of Andrew Haigh’s sublime 45 Years, showing a couple who have been together for decades adjusting to upheaval and having the rug pulled out from under them. The other vital thing this film does is show people in their mid-60s being sexual beings (something that one of Neeson’s recent films, Widows, also did). The performances of Neeson and especially Manville are mesmerizing and the score is beautiful. This small film is definitely worth seeking out.