"Closing the Ring" was the last film directed by Richard Attenborough, then aged 83, and only the third of his films (after "Magic" and "A Chorus Line") to be based upon an entirely fictitious story. There are three connected plotlines. The first is set in Michigan in 1941. Three friends, Jack, Chuck and Teddy, are all in love with the same girl, Ethel Ann Roberts, although it is Teddy whom she loves and eventually marries. When America enters the war after Pearl Harbour, all three friends join the U.S. Army Air Force.
The other plotlines are both set in 1991. In the first, also set in Michigan, we meet a now elderly Ethel again at her husband's funeral. She appears to have become cynical and disillusioned with life, and is quite clearly indifferent to her husband's death, much to the distress of her daughter Marie, who adored her father. The final plotline is set in Belfast, Northern Ireland. A boy named Jimmy Riley and Michael Quinlan, a retired fireman, are excavating the wreckage of a B-17 bomber which crashed in 1944, killing the crew. Jimmy finds a ring which belonged to one of the dead airmen and determines to track down the man's family. We eventually discover that the owner of the ring was Teddy and that the man who died in Michigan in 1991 was Ethel's second husband, Chuck, whom she married after Teddy's death. (Teddy had made Chuck promise to look after Ethel should anything happen to him in the war).
The film had a mixed response form the critics, but I was not particularly taken with it. I felt that it did not do enough to explore what should have been its central theme, namely how the beautiful, vivacious, optimistic and loving Ethel of 1941 became the embittered, heavy-drinking old woman of fifty years later. The implication is that Ethel felt herself morally bound to marry Chuck because of his promise to Teddy, but did not really want to do so- there is a suggestion that she would have preferred Jack- and carried a hidden burden of resentment for the next five decades, even though, from what we hear about Chuck, we would appear to have had many good qualities. (More so than Jack, who appears to have been something of a womaniser). Because we do not see anything of her marriage to Chuck, however, we are unable to judge how psychologically plausible Ethel's reaction might be.
There is an attempt to tie the Belfast plotline in with the Northern Irish political situation in the early nineties, but I felt that this theme did not fit in well with the rest of the story. I also found it a bit depressing that, nearly a decade after the Good Friday Agreement, film-makers still seemed unable to think about Ulster other than in terms of terrorism and sectarian conflict.
The best acting contribution comes from Shirley MacLaine as the older Ethel; none of the others are particularly distinguished, although none are particularly bad. Attenborough and the scriptwriters, however, seem unable to turn an over-complicated story into a coherent drama. It is not perhaps the end to his career that Attenborough would have wished for, and certainly not in the class of some of his great films like "Magic", "Gandhi", "Chaplin" and "Shadowlands". 5/10
The other plotlines are both set in 1991. In the first, also set in Michigan, we meet a now elderly Ethel again at her husband's funeral. She appears to have become cynical and disillusioned with life, and is quite clearly indifferent to her husband's death, much to the distress of her daughter Marie, who adored her father. The final plotline is set in Belfast, Northern Ireland. A boy named Jimmy Riley and Michael Quinlan, a retired fireman, are excavating the wreckage of a B-17 bomber which crashed in 1944, killing the crew. Jimmy finds a ring which belonged to one of the dead airmen and determines to track down the man's family. We eventually discover that the owner of the ring was Teddy and that the man who died in Michigan in 1991 was Ethel's second husband, Chuck, whom she married after Teddy's death. (Teddy had made Chuck promise to look after Ethel should anything happen to him in the war).
The film had a mixed response form the critics, but I was not particularly taken with it. I felt that it did not do enough to explore what should have been its central theme, namely how the beautiful, vivacious, optimistic and loving Ethel of 1941 became the embittered, heavy-drinking old woman of fifty years later. The implication is that Ethel felt herself morally bound to marry Chuck because of his promise to Teddy, but did not really want to do so- there is a suggestion that she would have preferred Jack- and carried a hidden burden of resentment for the next five decades, even though, from what we hear about Chuck, we would appear to have had many good qualities. (More so than Jack, who appears to have been something of a womaniser). Because we do not see anything of her marriage to Chuck, however, we are unable to judge how psychologically plausible Ethel's reaction might be.
There is an attempt to tie the Belfast plotline in with the Northern Irish political situation in the early nineties, but I felt that this theme did not fit in well with the rest of the story. I also found it a bit depressing that, nearly a decade after the Good Friday Agreement, film-makers still seemed unable to think about Ulster other than in terms of terrorism and sectarian conflict.
The best acting contribution comes from Shirley MacLaine as the older Ethel; none of the others are particularly distinguished, although none are particularly bad. Attenborough and the scriptwriters, however, seem unable to turn an over-complicated story into a coherent drama. It is not perhaps the end to his career that Attenborough would have wished for, and certainly not in the class of some of his great films like "Magic", "Gandhi", "Chaplin" and "Shadowlands". 5/10