Michael Caine may be getting on in years, but he can still carry the weight of an entire film production on his aged shoulders.
“Is Anybody There?,” available on DVD and Blu-ray Nov. 17, casts Caine as an cantankerous magician forced to live in a mom and pop nursing home against his wishes.
It’s a slight confection, full of small comedic moments that never quite add up to something dramatically profound.
But with Caine in nearly every scene, director John Crowley wisely steps out of the way and lets the actor charm us all over again.
The film, which looks quietly radiant on Blu-ray, introduces us to a nursing home run by a young couple (Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey) and their precocious son, Eddie (Bill Milner).
The home is chockablock with wacky seniors, although the screenplay manages to leave a smidgen of room for each to have a moment of quiet dignity.
Enter Clarence (Caine), a retired entertainer who would rather be anywhere else but trapped in a house full of seniors. He once toured the region as a roving magician in his colorful van, but now he spends his days pining for his late wife and arguing with Eddie.
The old man and Eddie eventually make peace, and a friendship quickly blossoms from their differences. The youngster is obsessed with the supernatural, and Clarence still has enough tricks left up his fraying sleeve to give Eddie a few good frights.
What begins as a modestly entertaining film, one which doesn’t diminish older people but draws out their eccentricities, gets bogged down in predictable plot wrinkles.
We get maudlin moments and a few emotional flare ups, but the comedic elements recede without giving way to a drama with any real impact.
Caine is wonderful – what else is new? – making Clarence a thorny blend of regret and ebbing vitality. Young Milner holds his own with the Oscar winner, conveying the sense that the family business leaves little time for hands-on parenting.
“Is Anybody’s There?” offers beautifully subdued cinematography that burnishes the story its straining to tell. And Morrissey deserves credit not just for sporting a retro mullet but making a character at once both pathetic and all too human.
“Is Anybody’s There?” lets Caine make the movie his own. But one of the final sequences features a cloying visual that’s typical of a film that can’t measure up to its celebrated star.
The Blu-ray version features a sampling of deleted scenes.
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I'm an award-winning journalist and film critic with more than a decade of experience in newspapers, magazines and the Web. I'm a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the Washington, DC Area Film Critics Association and the Denver Film Critics Society.
