Screening between Friday 12th and Wednesday 31st December 2008 @ Watershed, Bristol

Tucked safely away from all the melodramatic love stories which the Edwardian era usually sits upon is the honest comedy Dean Spanley. The absurd playfulness of the plot - in this case revolving around reincarnation, the possibility that a human’s soul never dies - gives Toa Fraser’s film is a refreshing excursion from the average yuletide movie.

All the main characters meet each other at a special lecture on reincarnation (a subject that fascinated Edwardians) including Dean Spanley (Sam Neill), with his cleric status, who is thrust into the foreground by the film’s narrator and Henslowe Fisk (Jeremy Northam) who badgers Spanley for his views upon reincarnation. Vibrant themes come into play with references to the imperial tokay, a sweet Hungarian wine, which Henslowe uses to entice Spanley into having dinner with him. Spanley is drawn to the tokay like a dog to a bone and it is suggested that the cleric is the reincarnation of the family dog, Wag.

However, this magnet and playful plot which draws all the characters together attracts a much more emotional and heartfelt relationship of that between father and son. Peter O’Toole plays the bitter father who has lost touch with his son and himself, but on attending one of these dinner parties, he learns that these tales are more than just pure ‘poppycock’. By intertwining the past life of Dean Spanley, the dog called Wag, and Mr Fisk’s lost dog, we witness an inner release within the father. He accepts Spanley’s words and likewise accepts his own past events which push him into finding the inner love he had for his son. Slow recognition is key to Fisk’s self discovery. O’Toole’s acting skills leave nothing to the imagination; he delivers his lines with such authenticity that he can fill a watching audience with infectious laughter as well as dripping tears.

www.watershed.co.uk

Kayleigh Cassidy