John Madden’s comedy is gentler than its subject and better than its genre, carried by Rhys Ifans and Laura Linney, who play the illness in their hands and faces rather than in speeches. It is kind to a fault, and the score keeps explaining.
Paul Mayhew-Archer has written a comedy about a man whose body has stopped taking instruction, and Onwards and Sideways is his attempt to make jokes about illness without turning it into a punchline or a sermon. John Madden directs, and the result is a good, warm, carefully made film about two people learning to live with what their bodies will no longer do. It is also soft in places where it could afford to be harder, and we will say where. But the verdict is simple: if you can bear the subject, this is worth your evening.
Rhys Ifans plays Tony Evans, and the performance is in the detail. Watch what he does with a cup, or a coat sleeve, or the half-second between deciding to stand and standing. Ifans has always been a loose, long-limbed actor, and here he is playing a man whose looseness has been taken from him, so that every ordinary movement has to be planned. He never asks for sympathy and he is funny about it, which is harder than it sounds. Laura Linney’s Emma Dretzin is the opposite case: she has made the illness part of her manner, brisk and practical and faintly amused, and Linney lets you see how much that manner costs to keep up. The scenes between them are the film.
There is a moment, early on, where Tony tries to do something small and domestic and cannot, and nobody in the scene says anything about it. We were more moved than we expected to be, and we have seen a good many films about illness. It was the silence that did it: Mayhew-Archer trusts the audience to notice, and Madden holds the shot and does not cut away. The film is at its best whenever it behaves like that, and it does so more often than not.
Monica Dolan, as Tony’s wife Liz, has the thankless job of being the person who has to watch, and she is good at being tired without being a martyr. Rory Kinnear’s Professor Ridge delivers bad news in the voice of a man who has delivered it before and has not yet gone numb, and his handful of scenes are dry and exact. Isabella Nefar and Leah Byrne, as Bahar and Julie, fill out a world that feels lived in rather than assembled for the occasion.
Danny Cohen shoots it plainly and close, in daylight and in kitchens, and the plainness suits it: this is not a film that wants you to admire the view. Úna Ní Dhonghaíle cuts at the speed of the people on screen, which is to say slowly when it needs to be, and she gives Ifans the time his character has to take. Thomas Newman’s score is the one department that does not trust the material. It is pretty, as his scores are, and it arrives too often, underlining scenes that were already legible, and once or twice we felt our response being arranged for us.
The larger weakness is temperament. Mayhew-Archer is a kind writer, and the film resolves nearly every scene kindly, so that after an hour we could usually guess where the next one would land. Nobody behaves badly for long. The illness is allowed to be frightening, but the people around it are not allowed to be frightened in ways that make them unpleasant, and real illness is not so well mannered. At 110 minutes the film does not overstay, but it does not surprise either, and a film about a condition this unpredictable might have risked more unpredictability itself.
Set against Madden’s own work, this is closer to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel than to Mrs Brown: a comedy for grown-ups about decline, in which decline is kept at a courteous distance. The reviews so far have been warmer than we are, though not by much, and we understand why; the two leads are good enough to carry a softer script than they deserved. Watch it with someone you are prepared to talk to afterwards. It is the kind of film that starts conversations in the kitchen, which may be exactly what its writer wanted.
