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MovieMail's Review
Milo Wakelin finds O'Toole in magnificent form in this delightful adult fairytale.
Based on Lord Dunsany's 1936 novella "My Talks with Dean Spanley" and adapted by veteran screenwriter Alan Sharp, this joint British / New Zealand production is a superlatively-cast tale of Edwardian fancy boasting an outstanding central performance by Peter O'Toole.
After a chance encounter at a lecture on the Transmigration of Souls, Fisk (Jeremy Northam) invites Dean Spanley (Sam Neill) over to dinner, where the whiff of very rare, very expensive Imperial Tokay takes the affable cleric back to his past life.... as a spaniel. Fisk's 'conveyancer' of Tokay (Australian character actor Bryan Brown) is unimpressed, as is his cantankerous father, Fisk Senior (O'Toole), but Fisk is determined to dig deeper into Spanley's four-legged past.
What starts out as a shaggy dog story slowly metamorphoses into an affecting meditation on the nature of bereavement, and it is to Kiwi director Toa Fraser's credit that he doesn't force the pace. With such a strong cast (including Judy Parfitt as Fisk Senior's long-suffering housekeeper) the film stands on its own as a drawing-room drama - and O'Toole is simply magnificent: an old dog for whom, in acting terms, there are no tricks left to be learnt.
A delightful adult fairytale set in Edwardian England, this is a charming, life-affirming film which happily celebrates British eccentricity. With a superb cast (Peter O'Toole, Sam Neill, Jeremy Northam) led by a knockout performance from O' Toole as a misanthropic old curmudgeon; this is a period yarn with a real twist in its tail.
Since the death of his younger son in the Boer War, Horatio Fisk (O'Toole) has aged into a bitter and curmudgeonly misanthrope, distanced even from his good-natured older son, Henslowe (Jeremy Northam), who visits him weekly. To relieve the tedium of their regular outings, the pair decide to attend a lecture on the Transmigration of Souls delivered by a visiting Hindu Swami. There, they meet the eccentric and mysterious Dean Spanley (Sam Neill), with whom Fisk Jr strikes up a bizarre friendship.
