Closing the Ring features complex and scintillating performances from Shirley MacLaine (as Ethel Ann), Christopher Plummer (As Jack) with solid support by veterans such as the late great Peter Postlethwaite and Brenda Fricker. Neve Campbell in a sort of third lead is also terrific as the daughter who is frustrated and nonplussed over being shut out by her mother. As you might expect, the young people in this film get a bit more of the screen time (although not nearly as skewed as usual - see The Debt, etc.). Mischa Barton as the young, high-spirited, and willful Ethel Ann, supplies the energy and marvelous acting to make these segments work along with the chemistry with the young man playing Teddy (her soul- mate). For me, the other young actors in these segments, the fellow who played Chuck (Arnell) was supposed to be sturdy but quiet; he was quiet but the sturdy art was never reflected by the actor - he just seemed pathetic. Gregory Smith who played young Jack, had lots of personality and complexity, but there is no way that person grows up physically or emotionally to be Christopher Plummer's Jack. On the other side of the pond, the young actors playing tartly Eleanor (later Fricker) and callow young Quinlan (later Postlethwaite) were perfectly cast and acted in their tiny roles. The head-turning performance to me was by the irrepressible Jimmy (Martin McCann) who took the role of the romantic and impetuous naif far beyond the script in his mannerisms and energy.Overall, this is a bit overlong with some unnecessary sequences and a bit too much melancholia. But, that's my opinion and mostly nitpicking. If you like epic WWII romances and as a romantic love to say their present-day resolutions, this movie is well worth your time.

First of all, this didn't deserve the straight to DVD treatment it received for the U.S. It's not perfect by any means, but it's an experience that should have been seen on the big screen. No, it's not action packed, but it's beautiful to watch. It's a romance with dimensions that work very well, and oddly enough I wasn't one step ahead of it the whole way through. Some elements are always a bit predictable for a film like this, but I wasn't always entirely sure where it was heading next. This could have gotten a solid score of 10 had it not been for several severe flaws. The biggest of which is the actor playing Teddy. Now imagine The Notebook if Ryan Gosling was an awful actor, it would have destroyed the movie. Luckily, as important as the Teddy character is, he's not in a massive part of the film, and it's easy to imagine what the character should have been, and believe the key romance behind the film. Mischa worked for me for the most part, although she had a majority of her scenes with the lifeless Teddy character. McClain and Plummer were amazing as they usually always are. Campbell did a believable effort as the daughter lost behind all the secrets, and I loved the actors who played the young friends of Teddy. Lastly, in the end we are treated with one of the most beautiful film songs in years. Watch the credits, you'll here the amazing Lost Without Your Love, which will complete your experience with this flawed but wonderful film.

Closing The Ring has been lambasted by reviewers as too sentimental and mawkish, but those viewers who are past 40 or 50 will recall a more innocent time in movie theaters when great stories were told and films weren't always designed around specific actors and actresses with on cue special effects and computer generated images. Closing The Ring is such a film. It's based on a true story, which I recall reading in the newspaper some years ago. The star of the film is not the actors and actresses who people the film and play the parts. It's the story. Shifting time, loyalties, and dreams lost and found form the core of the film with second chances in life thrown in for good measure. While the screenplay is not always up to muster, it covers the necessary ground for the most part, and for some viewers, it will be a throwback to what was once known as good old fashioned entertainment.Lord Attenborough has made several better films than Closing The Ring, but few of them have the charm and nostalgia of this one. Mischa Barton is the young lady promised to a soldier who never returns from the war, which is why any viewer who lived through any war years and lost someone dear will identify with the film. Shirley MacLaine is the older Ethel Ann version of the Mischa Barton character, and Christopher Plummer is the older character version of Jack, who has carried a buried torch for Ethel Ann all these years. Just as interesting is the subplot with Pete Postlethwaite as a grown man who is unwillingly faced with exercising his demons. Martin McCann as the young, persistent optimist Jimmy is a scene stealer in the film; he is like a match lighting the torch of healing and carrying it with him where e'er he goes. With healing comes pain and truth. This is Lord Attenborough's last film to date. *** of 4 stars.

Great filmmakers usually end their careers on a sour note and this is no exception; barring some inept future use of British lottery money it is unlikely that the knight Sir Richard (nay, call me LORD Richard) will get another 15 million pounds or so to blow again.Pick your favorite: Henry Hathaway bowed out with SUPER DUDE (a blaxploitation film I had the privilege of viewing in Cleveland on a double bill at the Scrumpy Dump Theater (!) some 35 years ago; Billy Wilder ended with BUDDY BUDDY; William Wyler had THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES (on paper a step up from SUPER DUDE, but not by all that much); Frank Capra with POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES which he really hated, per his autobiography; Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (hardly up to his high standards); Otto Preminger had THE HUMAN FACTOR, which I (alone?) liked (I've been a rabid Nicol Williamson fan since seeing him at Stratford as one of the greatest Macbeths, opposite Helen Mirren) and which costarred Attenborough. Even Michael Powell, apart from a look-back docu, culminated his career with an innocuous but hardly impressive Children's Film Foundation effort THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW, which I watched once at MoMA for completeness. There are obvious exceptions: Joe Mankiewicz bowed out with SLEUTH, an estimable movie and David Lean's A PASSAGE TO India was a winner.Per the particularly self-serving (and useless) "making of" featurette on the DVD release titled "Love, Loss & Life", CLOSING THE RING is the folly of several producers who fell in love with a first-timer's screenplay based on the actual finding of an old wedding ring in the Irish hills. The flimsy, yet convoluted, script got funding and, per the interviews, bowled over Attenborough, too. How audience members react, limited to video fans in the U.S. where the Weinsteins thought better of wasting money on a theatrical release, is an individual matter, but the tired blood on screen here is frankly an embarrassment.Some cinematic lions, notably Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer, as well as from a more recent generation Brenda Fricker and Pete Postlethwaite, are matched against some young talent, but the performances are uniformly poor. Having seen all of Attenborough's theatrical releases in first-run I concede he is capable of very good (Gandhi) but when he is bad, he turns out execrable material, notably the insulting A CHORUS LINE adaptation. I enjoyed YOUNG WINSTON, but then again I liked NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA by Schaffner back then too -pageantry is easy to take. But when Richard tried a genre film MAGIC for Joseph E. Levine, after making A BRIDGE TOO FAR for that once-famous showman, mediocrity ruled -about 10 steps below no-budget maestro Lindsay Shonteff's DEVIL DOLL. Despite the filmmakers' protests of how moving and inspirational this love story hit them, on the screen it is flat and dull. The young cast, led by Mischa Barton, gives paper-thin performances, and the attempt by Attenborough "to be hip" by having Barton nude a couple of times is beneath contempt. That's as old a ploy as THE YELLOW TEDDY BEARS, a well-meaning (and boring) British exploitation film from 1964 for which I saw a vintage U.S. coming attraction just this past weekend (resuscitated by Something Weird Video) in which extraneous nude scenes were added to release it stateside as GUTTER GIRLS. Now I might accuse the Weinsteins of such ploys, but for Richard to stoop that low -wow!The back and forth plotting from 1941 (actually 1944 it turns out in the narrative later) and 1991 to shoehorn in the Irish Troubles is undigested screen writing of the worst order. Connections between the two are lame and all the "maybe" and suggestive material goes nowhere. For example, strident Neve Campbell (a performance worse even than her terrible effort in the Alan Rudolph dud about sex INTIMATE AFFAIRS) as Shirley's grown up daughter creates wonderment as to "who's her daddy" but it turns out to be strictly a red herring, time-wise. Ditto casting Fricker of all people as the old-age version of a W.W. II "tart" who slept with all the Yanks -this hook is dangled for the viewer and left unresolved. Postlethwaite is perhaps the best performer in this one, but his role is 100% functional, designed for a big "reveal" only.I've never seen MacLaine so disinterested (and uninteresting) in a movie- she looks like she's playing under protest. The character of a woman who had basically three beaux but wasted her life attached to the dead one is admittedly unplayable but she doesn't even try. Plummer has more energy, perhaps he alone was given Geritol on the set, but this is a thankless assignment as the "good buddy" who never got the girl. The debuting young Irish thesp Martin McCann is insufferably cheery in what turns out to be the lead role, the boy who found "the ring". Closeups and other emphasis on the object make one think we are living in the shadow of Tolkien, but needless to say this totem is of zero importance.CLOSING THE RING is so bad one is reminded of the late Frank Perry's disastrously soapy MOMMIE DEAREST and MONSIGNOR, for which a wonderful director ended up being the butt of catcalls from Midnight Movie audiences. Unfortunately, its plotting is too dull and execution too mediocre for this lame RING to end up with any such afterlife, avoiding even the pitiful fate of having Hedda Lettuce lead camp followers in weekly derision at my local Chelsea (NY division, not England) cinema.