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If you're an ex-Beatle, you get to have your ashes scattered in the Ganges. If you're East End butcher Jack Dodds (Caine), you set your sights a tad lower by asking your drinking buddies to throw your final remains off Margate pier. A touching gesture, but isn't there enough pollution in the seas already?
The plot may be on the mawkish side, but that doesn't stop Fred Schepisi's adaptation of Graham Swift's Booker Prize-winning novel being a gentle, affecting mix of road movie and soap opera. It helps that the Australian director has assembled a crack cast of veteran thesps who together span six decades of British cinema history.
Had Caine, Tom Courtenay and David Hemmings not blazed the trail for working-class actors back in the 60s, it's doubtful Ray Winstone, and Bob Hoskins would even have careers. So there's something fitting about them coming together on screen to reminisce, bicker, and booze their way to Jack's final resting place.
Numerous flashbacks fill in the gaps and explain how Caine and Hoskins became friends, why Hemmings is mad at Winstone and why Jack's widow Amy (a dowdy Helen Mirren) has opted not to come along for the ride. The answers to these questions are hardly earth-shattering, yet Brian Tufano's handsome widescreen photography and Paul Grabowsky's excellent music turn this fairly parochial melodrama into something really rather special.
Kudos too, to casting director Patsy Pollock for finding newcomers to play the characters' younger selves. The likenesses are truly uncanny.
