Film
My life as a dog
by David Larsen
Sam Neill unleashes his inner canine in Toa Fraser’s Dean Spanley.
Peter O’Toole is a force of nature. Casting him as an incorrigible old rogue with a broken heart is at once the best and the risk-iest move Toa Fraser makes in his new film, Dean Spanley. It anchors the quirky, whimsical story in an unforgettably charismatic performance. It also puts the rest of the cast – good character actors all – in the position of surfers trying to hang ten on a tsunami. The most impressive thing about this impressive film is that Fraser manages to build a genuine ensemble piece around O’Toole without in any way reining him in.
We’re introduced to O’Toole’s character, Horatio Fisk, via voice-over narration, one of the most overused, heavy-handed techniques in the filmmaker’s arsenal. But Fraser, unlike so many directors, is employing it in something other than a desperate attempt to steer his audience through a weak or confused story-line. Our narrator is Fisk Junior (Jeremy Northam), a quiet, unremarkable London art dealer, still in mourning for the loss of his brother in the recent Boer War, and for his mother’s subsequent decline and death. The imperious Fisk Senior refuses to grieve for either of them, or to discuss them, or to acknowledge that, as a result, his surviving son’s weekly visits are becoming increasingly fraught.
O’Toole would own these early scenes outright even had the screenplay – expertly adapted by Alan Sharp from Lord Dunsany’s 1936 novella – not gifted him so many wonderful lines. With his gloriously resonant voice and hauntingly expressive features, he is a far stronger and more immediately likeable presence than Northam. In other words, he dominates the screen in precisely the way Fisk Senior dominates Fisk Junior. His son’s wry narration is a remarkably well-judged piece of directorial balancing, giving the younger Fisk backdoor access to our sympathies without requiring him to wage an unwinnable war against his father’s charm.
Looking for ways to entertain Fisk Senior other than conversing with him, Fisk Junior drags him to a public talk on reincarnation, where they meet Wrather (Bryan Brown), an affable if slightly shady Australian businessman, and Dean Spanley (Sam Neill), a local clergy-man. A series of unlikely coincidences leads Fisk Junior to the discovery that the dean’s interest in past lives and the transmigration of souls is not merely an admirable instance of episcopal open-mindedness. Under the right circumstances, he goes into a kind of trance, and reminisces aloud about his previous life. In which he was a dog.
The light touch with which Fraser introduces and develops this outrageous conceit is perfectly matched by Neill’s performance. The shift in focus away from O’Toole in these middle scenes leaves a vacuum that Neill could easily have tried to fill the wrong way, with a barking, whining, faux-dramatic rendition of “Dog (Reincarnated)”. Instead, he makes the dean’s canine persona a very slightly amped-up version of his human one – enthusiastic, self-important, full of knowing observations on the flawed characters of cats and the delights of chasing sheep. It’s an understated bit of acting that gradually accumulates power and pathos, until finally Neill’s presence in the film comes close to matching O’Toole’s.
It becomes obvious very early on that these reminiscences, which Fisk Junior encourages at first out of nothing more than amused fascination, are going to tie in somehow with the Gordian Knot at the story’s heart: Fisk Senior’s inability to grieve for his wife and son. Fraser makes no effort to hide the connection, or to lean too hard on it, allowing our developing affection for the characters to carry us over the shoals of Extreme Narrative Implausibility. When Fisk Junior finally contrives to bring his father and the dean together, the sense of resolution is wonderfully satisfying. Mark this down as one of the most original and rewarding films you’re likely to see this year.
DEAN SPANLEY, directed by Toa Fraser.
