Mr. Morgan's Last Love
Director: Sandra Nettelbeck
Actors: Gillian Anderson, Jane Alexander
Release Date: Saturday 30th November 2013
Genre(s): Drama, Factual
Running time: Belgium minutes
Released at the tail end of 2013 in America under the shorter moniker Last Love, it’s almost universally never a good sign when a movie changes titles between region releases, like trying to sweep it under the rug for international audiences. “I hear Last Love was terrible, but I’ve heard nothing about Mr Morgan’s Last Love, which features the exact same cast…” Nice try, movie-makers!
Michael Caine, whose American accent hopscotches from scene to scene, plays a retired philosophy lecturer who is moping around Paris having imagined conversations with his recently deceased wife. He’s feeling lonely and alienated in the big city, but one day he literally bumps into the beautiful but quite young dance teacher Clemence Poesy on the bus, and he begins a completely platonic relationship with her.
It’s not long before Caine’s kids arrive, played by Gillian Anderson and Justin Kirk, but they don’t really affect the plot of the movie much, with the former probably on set for just the day, and the latter is given nothing to do other than accuse Poesy of being a bit of a gold-digger. It’s around this point that we realise the movie has actually run out of story to tell, and director Sandra Nettleback has no idea how to keep interest raised in the central relationship. And we’re only half-way through the running time!
It’s not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with age-gap relationship movies – just look at the likes of Up or Venus or the inarguable classic Harold & Maude – but if you’re going to do the May-December thing, there had better be a good reason for it, other than ‘one is old, one is young, and isn’t it weird that they like each other?’
Despite the good work put in by Caine (wonky accent aside) and Poesy, we never really get a good feel of their relationship, and the director lays on the schmaltz like it’s coming out of a glue gun. When not much happens, and what little does happen doesn’t really resonate, then what was the point?
