Tropic Sprockets / Ordinary Love

By Ian Brockway

Lisa Barros D’Sa (Cherrybomb) and Glenn Leyburn direct the heartfelt and understated “Ordinary Love,” a character study of a middle aged couple facing a great medical challenge. The film uses a soft and slow rhythm to build a moving portrait of two people engaged in sweetness, care and understanding.

Joan (Lesley Manville) and Tom (Liam Neeson) are a loving couple. One morning Joan finds a lump on her breast. Tom, quick with jokes, deflects it as nothing. Joan is bothered by it. She resolves to go to a doctor, who is somewhat alarmed, but says it is most likely a benign cyst. Joan goes to a specialist who tells her it looks very serious and orders a barrage of tests.

This is one of Liam Neeson’s best outings. His face is quiet and worried, full of meaning. Then as if by magic, he can turn into a matinee comedian by making Manville’s Joan giggle like a young girl.

Lesley Manville is terrific as a sensual and sexual woman with an infectious laugh who is about to travel to an unknown continent known as cancer. During tests and treatment, she is depicted in the hospital as a space traveler tinted in purple and blue, leaping into the vast unknown.

Tom attempts to shrug off any medical danger with a smirk or a verbal slight but then his face becomes as tight as a tuning fork. His eyes steeled by fear. Neeson’s Tom is hunted by an invisible gangster that he cannot see: thugs of circumstance, medical disease and hopelessness.

Neeson usually plays men of swift action and vengeance but here, he is a man of anxiety and indecision. Only by speaking at his daughter’s grave is Tom full of conviction.

Joan meets the kind Peter (David Willmot), a former teacher of the couple’s late daughter who offers the couple compassion and acceptance.

At times Neeson is like a Willem Dafoe Christ figure, his forehead a mass of Expressionist wear and wrinkles. Then in an instant, like Indiana Jones, Neeson can turn, referring to Manville’s Joan as “kid”.

Though this film is about breast cancer, a very formidable and scary condition, “Ordinary Love” is an undeniably sweet and delicate story about two emotional people who face their shadow-selves and continue to love, fully and romantically.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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