Mr. Morgan's Last Love (2013)

It's tough to decide whether or not to recommend watching Last Love. If you're a Michael Caine fan, you'll probably want to watch him do some incredible acting, but you won't want to watch him in such a sad story. If you happen to like sad movies, you might want to give it a try. But, as much as I love Michael Caine, I could have skipped watching this movie. It was just too depressing.The beginning of the film falls under the "what does it take" category of the Academy Awards. Michael Caine is sitting at his wife's deathbed, and after she's passed away, outsiders come in to try and remove him from the room. He fights them, wanting to stay with his companion as long as possible. I don't think it's possible to watch this scene without bursting into tears, and I'm sure Michael was just as baffled as I was that he wasn't nominated for an Oscar that year. Believe it or not, the rest of the film isn't really any more uplifting. Jane Alexander plays Michael's late wife, and she visits him several times throughout the film, talking to him and giving him advice on his attempt to start a new chapter. He meets a French dance teacher, Clemence Poesy, and strikes up a friendship. The audience is supposed to realize that his unrequited crush is doomed to remain unrequited, because unless Michelle has grandfather-issues, she won't look at him as a romantic prospect. I still think of Michael Caine as how he looked decades ago, so I didn't understand why it was an unrequited crush in the first place.In any case, this is an incredibly depressing film about how a man tries to continue living even though he's lost his life companion. Use your own judgement to see if you're able to sit through it.Kiddy Warning: Obviously, you have control over your own children. However, due to depressing and adult content, I wouldn't let my kids watch it.

the point of the film is that isolation can take place at any stage in our lives, at 25 or at 85. whatever their age, people share the same desire for company and for fulfillment, and when these vanish, we wither and vanish. this statement is the genius of the film, a fact which the film critics seem to have missed altogether. reading the reviews, you get the impression that they have not absorbed the film or analyzed it in any useful way. they repeat each other's phrases. there is no independent thought, no intellect or critical faculty applied by any of them. one critic did not even bother to watch the film (he says she is a ballet teacher). the biggest problem with the film, i would say, is its audience. the best reviews are found in the comments, which are made by amateurs.

Sandra Nettelbeck's zombified film, based upon the French novel La Douceur Assassine, ostensibly opens where Michael Haneke's Amour ended. But while Haneke's film sought to challenge our principles and provoke topical debate, Nettelbeck's is more likely to challenge the patience and provoke irritation in all but the most undemanding. The dialogue is trite, the relational dynamics are soapy, and the tone is sentimental.Matthew Morgan (Michael Caine) has just put his wife (Jane Alexander) to eternal sleep. He's condemned to shuffling around his plush Parisian apartment, now an echoing mausoleum, until such a time that he plucks up the courage to meet his wife in the thereafter. But his dwindling existence is suddenly electrified when he's hit upon (or, contrives to be hit upon) by a young dance instructor named Pauline (Clémence Poésy). Her father is dead. "You remind me of my father," she tells Matthew. This gives you an idea of the sort of script we're dealing with.The essential premise, which wavers between faintly creepy and screw-faced baffling, wouldn't be such a problem if there were deeper layers of drama underneath. But it's all surface. Potentially difficult issues – e.g. assisted suicide – are brushed against gently, while others are glossed over entirely – e.g. the dubious sexual energy between lonely old Matthew and daddy's little princess Pauline. And this is before Matthew's vile children (Justin Kirk and Gillian Anderson) turn up to do some shopping and tell their dad he's selfish. It's a film world where characters are seemingly more interested in soap operatics than behaving like recognisable human beings; and where men and women relate like alien species.Michael Caine is suitably bumbling and shell-shocked in the title role, even though, playing an American, he adopts a bizarre accent that prances across most of the Western hemisphere, often in the course of a single line. Poésy is adorable; except, beyond the basic knowledge of her own bereavement, we never truly understand what draws her so powerfully to Matthew, let alone why she sidles up to his hospital bed in a see-through top. Anderson provides a brief burst of energy, but it's a cameo really. The heavy lifting is left to Kirk, and it's a charmless delivery of a charmless character."It wasn't supposed to be like this!" cries Matthew. Another clunker of a line from a screenplay blandified to oblivion. No alarms and no surprises; the surreal, vanishing point horror that is spousal grief is rendered as hazy anaesthesia, where the senses are dulled until some younger model comes along to reawaken them. The sequences where Matthew relives conversations with his wife are presumably meant to represent reflective recollection, but I couldn't help wondering if they might be born of guilt for burying his face in Pauline's boobs while he wept for his loss.The cinematography is a watercolour array of picture postcards depicting landmark Paris and quaint surrounding countryside, scored to trickling piano texture that doesn't so much complement the drama as provide a marshmallow mattress topper.A film with a geriatric theme needn't be geriatric in pace and tone. It patronises the very people whose plight it seeks to illuminate. How about some psychological insight? Some effort to chart this melancholy territory? Okay, we see Matthew's desire to emerge from his malaise. But what does that malaise really look like? Feel like? By the end we're none the wiser, and one is left concluding that the film simply isn't trying hard enough on any level.

Last Love with Michael Cane is the tale of a widower at the crossroads a difficult predicament for any living soul.The film made me call to mind the role of Marlon Brando in the ever controversial Last Tango In Paris only from the widower angle of course but similar.His acting(Michael Caine) was extremely convincing and he is the kind of character you root for because of his grief and his strained relationships with his children.This movie is a great chance to see one of our finest screen actors in a leading role as well as explore the beautiful Parisian backdrop through the eyes of an unwilling unadaptive American to stubborn and grief stricken to change until he meets a compelling pretty young woman.