‘Quartet‘ started out life as a play, and it has now been adapted for the screen by its author Ronald Harwood, expanding it only a little, so that its theatrical roots are still visible.  It’s easy to see its attractions: the directorial début of Dustin Hoffman, it is wholeheartedly aimed at the older cinema goer, with the cast filled with the familiar faces of performers now into their 60s and 70s.

It is set in Beecham House, a retirement community for musicians, where a person’s preeminence, or otherwise, on theatrical billing ‘s of the past, still dictates their seating in the dining room.  Two things may threaten the comfortable status quo: the House may be running out of money, so to avert the threat of closure the residents are planning a gala concert in honour of Verdi’s birthday as a fund raiser; and the arrival of new resident Jean, played by Maggie Smith, a former opera star, who also, unfortunately, used to be married to long term resident Reggie (Tom Courtney).  Will Reggie and Jean be reconciled, and can Jean be persuaded to sing the quartet from Rigoletto with Reggie, and Cissy (Pauline Collins) and Wilf (Billy Connelly), to reprise a famous performance the four of them gave early in their careers?

That’s about it as far as plot is concerned, so there can be a feeling that not very much happens during the film; and there is no attempt to avoid the stereotypes of old age, the forgetful, the dippy, the bad tempered, the old goat making inappropriate suggestions to young women, the poorly, but before you dismiss it out of hand, it is not without its moments.  Tom Courtney’s performance takes it beyond the ordinary; the expression on his face when he discovers that the woman who broke his heart has just moved in brought a tear to this cynical yet sentimental eye.  And there was a recognisable reality to a short scene in which Michael Gambon, as the flamboyant pompous director of the concert, berates those around him for their inability to remind him of something he had said a few minutes before.

The final credits have a lot of charm, showing photographs of the performers, many of them really retired musicians, both as they were during the film and also when they were in their prime, reminding us all of the effects of time on otherwise luminous faces.

But I think the main effect the film had on me was to make me ponder how I will be living when it becomes difficult to maintain my own home.  Maybe I should club together with others who have similar interests now, so that we can know each other’s irritating idiosyncrasies and have found ways to cope with them, before it all becomes a necessity?  I’m not sure musicians would be my ideal companions, there seemed to be a bit too much screeching and scraping going on; but maybe a few nice quiet readers and writers, in a big enough house so that each could have a secluded corner…….

It’s always a mistake for me to have a glass of wine (OK maybe more than a single glass on this occasion) before going to the cinema at the end of a long day.  There’s something about the comfy seats and the darkness that just encourages heaviness in the eyelids, so I may have missed a few short interludes in the late showing of  The Master last week, but not as many as the friend with whom I went.

And while I can’t really say that the film is a gripping one, it is most definitely an interesting one.  Set in a stylised 1950s America, it tracks the meeting of Freddie Quill, a troubled drunken ex serviceman played by Joaquin Phoenix, and Lancaster Dodd, a charismatic charlatan leader of a small cult, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The director Paul Thomas Anderson has apparently side stepped the suggestions that the film is about the beginnings of Scientology.  Apart from having to constantly walk around the enthusiasts outside their shop on Tottenham Court Road when I worked in an office around the corner, I don’t know anything beyond ‘Tom Cruise’ about the cult, so I can’t comment on whether or not there are parallels, but what the movie did do was paint a vivid picture of an ego driven guru making up his philosophy as he goes along.

The first scenes of the film focus on Freddie Quill, a sailor, clearly suffering some kind of psychological problems, drunk most of the time on the moonshine he concocts himself from cough medicine and industrial alcohol.  Discharged from the Navy, we follow him through a series of jobs of increasing desperation, before he stows away on a pleasure boat on which a wedding party is underway.  There he meets Dodds, who is amused by him, and who cannot resist trying to bring him into the group, as a guinea pig for his developing strategies for dominating his followers.  Subsequently, egged on by Dodd’s zealot wife, played by Amy Adams, Quill takes on the role of enforcer, beating up rationalists who argue against the daftness of the teachings.   Following a parting of the ways, Dodds makes it clear that Quill, by leaving has become a mortal enemy from which there can be no return.

I enjoyed the performances; the camera comes close to all the faces from a vantage point somewhere near their chins, so the view is of a slightly uncomfortable angle of all the crags and creases of each expression.  Joaquin Phoenix, especially, has to bear close examination of his every move, and I found his an eerily convincing depiction of a character largely bewildered by the world even when he is sober.  He has also curved his body into the stooped and shambling shape of a serious drinker.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is an actor I would watch doing anything, although I know there are some who don’t agree.  I thought he was clever in the way he portrayed the narcissist, avuncular and intense until anyone questioned him, when he would lash out with sudden ferocity.  I particularly enjoyed a scene between him and Laura Linney as one of his wealthy followers.  Dodds had just brought out a new book of doctrine, and she had noticed that where before he had talked about ‘recalling’, he now used the word ‘imagining’, and she asked if this represented a change in the teaching.  Clearly caught out in having made a mistake he hadn’t intended, he berated her for questioning, and I felt certain she wouldn’t be making any more donations.

Overall the film is beautifully shot, the vistas are wide and richly coloured, and the period details are of that imagined golden era of post war America that may or may not ever have existed.  The narrative is subtle, nothing is spelled out, it’s a series of vignettes, almost, gradually building up into a story, although I did feel that it rather lost its way towards the end.  I didn’t really understand how the break between Dodds and Quill came about, as it felt totally unexpected and random, although perhaps that might have been the point.

It was also interesting that neither of the main characters really changed over the course of the film; each was the same at the end as he was at the beginning.  Given my recent comments about the strictures of the contemporary orthodoxy that every story has to represent some kind of ‘journey’, I’m pleased to say that I quite liked this feature of the film, that for all the gimcrack philosophy and ridiculous exercises to which Quill is subjected by Dodds, he manages to escape with his faults in tact.

Have you seen it?  What did you think?