On a clear day movie cast full#

He wanders around his English seaside town in a daze, swimming at the rec center for fun but otherwise suffering from panic attacks and general malaise. Our hero is Frank (Peter Mullan), recently laid off from the shipyard where he has worked for decades and now feeling defeated.

On a clear day movie cast full#

In this case it’s an old man who wants to swim the English Channel, but it could also be laid-off workers who want to strip (“The Full Monty”), or struggling factory owners who make shoes for transvestites ( “Kinky Boots”), or old ladies who pose naked for charity ( “Calendar Girls”), or strange villagers who want to collect a dead man’s lottery winnings (“Waking Ned Devine”), or I could go on and on.Īpart from that, it’s a reasonably charming story, directed by Gaby Dellal and written by Alex Rose (it’s the first feature for both of them) with confidence, if not always with grace. I'm huggable, lovable and eatable.' He said he found those words on a little paper flag stuck into a baked potato.The only thing wrong with “On a Clear Day” is that it’s too similar to too many other movies in which eccentric British people do odd things. Note: Baked Potato People movies are named in honor of my friend Billy (Silver Dollar) Baxter, who liked to announce: 'I've been tubbed, I've been rubbed, I've been scrubbed. I would, however, be prepared to sacrifice this movie as an offering toward Peter Mullan's future career. And after the Channel attempt - what then? Attempt to better his record? Get a job at the takeaway? Joan the wife seems altogether more sensible and goal-oriented, and although we are happy for Frank as he attempts to realize his dream, we are not to happy that we make offerings to the gods of cinema for allowing us to see this movie. But nothing in 'On a Clear Day' is especially compelling. It's a safe bet this is not the kind of movie where he is going to drown. Whether Frank succeeds, I will leave for you to discover. The movie leads up, as it must, to his Channel swim. Joan, meanwhile, is afraid to tell him of her bus-driving plans. This will budge him out of depression, and he can prove to himself that he is still to be reckoned with, despite his unemployment. Eventually, a plan takes shape: He will swim the English Channel. One day, impulsively, he swims the River Clyde. No matter Frank's crisis has served to budge them all out of their ruts, and his friends listen to Chan's proverb, confess they didn't know he spoke English and enlist him on the buddy team.įrank starts to swim. Or maybe that's just in one of his fortune cookies. His other buddies turn into natural-born male-bonders and turn up as a kind of chorus, led in wisdom by Chan ( Benedict Wong), owner of the local takeaway shop, who advises them, 'A gem cannot be polished without friction, or a man perfected without trials.' His wife, Joan ( Brenda Blethyn), decides the time has come at last to take the test and become a bus driver.

Not to fear: The movie offers those varieties of depression and panic that function not as real problems but as plot conveniences, setting the other characters astir. He is a man with inner torments (he blames himself for the drowning of a small son), and with time on his hands, he sinks into depression and is hospitalized with a panic attack. Mullan plays Frank Redmond, who has just been laid off his job after half a lifetime spent working as a ship builder in Glasgow. (See note below.) Mullan is at about the same stage in his career as Al Pacino was when he made ' Bobby Deerfield.' Actors sometimes make the mistake of thinking that because they can play anyone, they should.

When you start out working with Ken Loach, Danny Boyle and Michael Winterbottom, it shows recognition of sorts, I suppose, but not necessarily progress, to qualify as the lead in a Baked Potato People movie. I mention these titles to call attention to an extraordinary talent, and as a way of backing into my review of 'On a Clear Day,' which is a conventional film for an unconventional actor.

In ' Young Adam' (2003), he was the barge captain whose wife is stolen away by a young man they hire as crew. He directed ' The Magdalene Sisters' (2002), an angry exposé of the practice in Ireland of condemning sexually curious girls to a lifetime of unpaid servitude in church laundries. In Michael Winterbottom's' ' The Claim' (2000), a Thomas Hardy story moved to the Sierra Nevadas, he runs a frontier town with an iron hand. In Mike Figgis' ' Miss Julie' (1999), he was the servant who has an affair with a countess in a film based on the Strindberg play. Since then, one powerful performance after another.