All of Us Strangers (15, 105 minutes)
Verdict: Great Scott
Andrew Scott will not be holding up the Oscar statuette for his dazzling performance in All Of Us Strangers. Indeed, the film was completely overlooked in this week’s Oscar nominations.
But it will be universally acclaimed, certainly if Tuesday’s gala screening in London is anything to go by. The evening’s presenter, Edith Bowman, a former Radio 1 DJ, called the film a masterpiece and credited it with one of the greatest displays of acting in modern times.
At the end, when she invited him back on stage, a rhapsodic ovation raised the roof. A passerby, looking in, might have concluded that the smiling Irishman in a fashionable jacket had just returned from negotiating peace in the Middle East.
For his lead performance in All Of Us Strangers, Andrew Scott will be acclaimed by everyone else, certainly if Tuesday’s gala screening in London is anything to go by.
Andrew Scott (left, with Paul Mescal) has been widely praised for his portrayal of a lonely screenwriter who encounters the spirits of his deceased parents in director Andrew Haigh’s latest film.
Andrew Scott (center) stars in All Of Us Strangers as Adam, a troubled gay man who encounters the spirits of his deceased parents (played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy)
The writer and director of All Of Us Strangers (which is loosely based on a 1987 Japanese novel) is Andrew Haigh, whose wonderful 2015 film, 45 Years, could sort of be a companion piece to this. Although one focuses on a long heterosexual marriage and the other on a brief gay romance, they are both about love, loss, and the fierce complexity of human relationships.
In addition, they are both enhanced by truly impeccable acting, in 45 Years from Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, and here from Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy and Scott. Especially Scott. He plays Adam, a screenwriter who, when we first meet him in his city apartment, seems to be living, at best, a life of nostalgic solitude. On television, he watches Frankie Goes To Hollywood perform The Power Of Love, a recurring motif in the film and an indication of both his sexuality and the sentimental appeal of the mid-1980s, for reasons we will later understand late.
Then Adam meets a neighbor, Harry (Mescal), and they eventually become lovers. But he remains deeply affected by the deaths of his mother (Foy) and father (Bell) in a car accident when he was 11 years old.
Holding an old, faded photo of their suburban home, he returns to the same house and, his memories freeing his imagination, finds his parents still there, exactly as he remembers them from the 1980s.
His relationship with Harry develops, interspersed with these imaginary visits home, where he explains how his life has been since he was so suddenly orphaned and tells his mother that he is gay. She reacts like an 1980s mother, worried about AIDS and wondering if he’s talking about it openly “on the high street, at WH Smiths.”
His father is less surprised. As a child, Adam could never throw a ball properly. He always knew he was a bit “tutti-frutti”.
These encounters, “meeting” his parents in adult conditions for the first time, while sometimes regressing to prepubescence (even, in one scene, while wearing his childhood pajamas), are beautifully done. However, I found myself, unlike many of those around me, remaining resolutely dry-eyed.
Paul Mescal plays Harry in All Of Us Strangers, a neighbor of Adam (played by Andrew Scott) who soon becomes his lover
If I can get personal for a moment, my own father passed away when I was 14 years old. It’s a lingering regret that I only ever knew him when I was a boy, and I still sometimes dwell on the conversations we might have had now.
As in Adam’s case, these are heartwarming flights of fancy, not at all cutesy.
But I nevertheless felt strong emotions when, a few years ago, I reached the age he was when he died suddenly. I once had a profound conversation along similar lines with the journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, whose father, the powerful journalist Richard Dimbleby, died at 52. The issue of age is also what seems to trigger these daydreams in Adam.
So I found a lot of resonance in All Of Us Strangers, but watched with awe rather than adoration, hugely engaged but not hugely moved. For what?
Could it be because I’m not gay and a lot of Adam’s interactions with his parents are about his sexuality? I hope not. Either way, it’s an appealing idea: a man and his parents who he lost too young, and who can say things they didn’t manage to say the first time.
Additionally, All Of Us Strangers contains a final twist that I must not reveal but which still prompted a text exchange the next morning between me and the friend I saw it with.
A masterpiece? Not enough. But what a thoughtful and thought-provoking film.