Tweet

With its shifting time frames and emphasis on secrets, lies and regrets, Richard Attenborough's first film in a decade is a solidly crafted and earnestly played treatise on keeping promises and coping with the past. The busy action switches continually between small-town Michigan girl Mischa Barton and the trio of Second World War pilots competing for her affections and Belfast teenager Martin McCann, who becomes interested in her story after retired fireman Pete Postlethwaite unearths the wreckage of a B-17 bomber in the Black Mountains in the early 1990s. Linking the strands is Shirley MacLaine, who risks alienating daughter Neve Campbell by showing scant emotion after burying the man she married in grief. Despite its intricate structure, playwright Peter Woodward's debuting screenplay is a touch cumbersome in places, most notably in the Ulster sequences, and some of the performances are overcooked. But Barton and MacLaine touchingly convey the dreams and disappointments that make up so many lives, while Attenborough directs with the humanity and care that makes him such a skilful and successful commercial film-maker.

 

David Parkinson on 31st March 2008
View all 163 of David Parkinson's reviews