Film Review: A Song for Marion Healed by Music: Lives in Progress Steve Sprinkel Ojai, California 12 August 2012 Unexpected outcomes, never foretold by character or plot, are the audience’s most memorable rewards delivered in A Song for Marion, a new film written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams. The vitality of the film is borne by the struggles, conflict and survival of English working-class characters living out mortal inevitability. Amid the pathos, Williams provides a perfect amount of fun as antidote, diluting any sense of dread. The story is about overcoming personal loss and bringing oneself back into equilibrium, becoming a decent, caring, patient member of the human race when self pity would have been easier and self-justifying. Terence Stamp plays Arthur, the husband of Marion, played by Vanessa Redgrave. Marion has cancer, eventually in its last stage, and has found many friends and great distraction from her dire straights by joining a neighborhood chorus. Arthur barely facilitates her attendance at chorus practice and is churlishly dismissive of the other chorus members and their young director, Elizabeth, played by Gemma Arterton. The supporting choral cast of retirees sample out human perspectives and explore subtly in song other themes that are left otherwise unsaid. Elizabeth asks them all to take chances on stage and in life they might never have confronted on their own. Arthur is so cold, selfish and petty that one wonders why such a wonderfully charming woman like Marion puts up with his rudeness. Arthur is both brash and burdened, taking on the terminal doom that Marion refuses to oblige. He is protective to a fault because that has always been his role and now he plays it with a blundering vengeance. Terence Stamp smolders in these early scenes, barely able to control a rage not prescribed by simple circumstance, but evoking older pains as well as the one to come. Yet Marion loves him for good reasons known only to her. Their son, James, played by Christopher Eccleston, is losing a loving parent who will be survived by one he has never been emotionally safe with. Marion’s passing cleaves them more apart. By degrees we discover the emotional complexity that mercilessly drives their relationship, speaking without thinking, acting hurtfully without self-reproach. Redgrave’s Marion is dear, compelling and brave. Though she leaves the screen just past the midway point, her performance continues to inform the questions that need to be answered after her character dies. The denouement thereafter is a string of surprises. When the septuagenarians roll out a rendition of Motorhead’s Ace of Spades, it’s brilliant. So is it also that writer-director Williams never turns to a predictable sentiment that film formula falls prey to so often. When it is revealed that Elizabeth is single and alone, like James, that they might, or not, live happily ever after is for us to vaguely consider. When Arthur intends to repent of being a beast to his son, He is rebuffed. But we have allegiance to neither character because Williams has shown us heretofore no inclination to take sides. Williams let’s his people be as they are. When Arthur miraculously changes course and begins to sing with those he once despised, his redemption is not complete but shown as a life in progress. And Terence Stamp’s authentically moving solo singing performance at the end is the best surprise of all in a film about personal challenge and how we often act not too human and sometimes, despite our personal prologues, can surprise ourselves with our own humanity.