Graham Swift's 'Last Orders' is a fine story about a collection of old men and their baggage (in every sense of that word); translated into a movie by Fred Schepisi, it provides an outing for a number of fine British actors who do a good job in bringing their characters out from the page. The film as a whole, however, is less successful than its source. Partly this is because of the difficulty that films have in weaving as seamlessly between the past and the present as books can: the movie is always unambiguously in one time or the other, and switching between them, whereas the original could roam as freely as thoughts; perhaps the structure should have been more substantially altered, to make it more suitably cinematic (for example, the story of each man could have been told in succession). And maybe because of this, the quiet drama of the story of Ray never comes out quite as clearly as it does in the book. But it's still fun to enjoy the interactions of the cast.
Review of Last Orders
