Last Orders is a 2001 drama film written and directed by Fred Schepisi. The screenplay is based on the 1996 Booker Prize-winning novel Last Orders by Graham Swift.
Plot
The title refers to a pub landlord's last call and the final wishes of a dying man, in this instance Jack Dodds (Michael Caine), a south London butcher who greatly influenced four men over the course of his flawed but decent life. The quartet gathers to scatter Jack's ashes in Margate, where he had hoped to retire to a small seaside cottage with his wife Amy (Helen Mirren), a dream that was never fulfilled.
The four are: professional horse race gambler Ray Johnson (Bob Hoskins), aka Lucky, who fought beside Jack during World War II and has been his best friend since; former boxer Lenny (David Hemmings), who is always ready to settle an argument with his fists; undertaker Vic (Tom Courtenay) who acts as a buffer of sorts; and Jack's son Vince (Ray Winstone), a dealer of used luxury cars, whose relationship with his father never quite recovered when, as a young boy, he learned his real family perished in a wartime bombing and Jack and Amy took in the orphaned infant and raised him as their own.
As the quartet journeys from London by car to honour Jack's request, with stops at Canterbury Cathedral, the Chatham Naval Memorial, the hop farm where Jack and Amy met and a couple of pubs, they reminisce about their friend.
Amy is on a journey of her own to visit their daughter, June (Laura Morelli), who has learning difficulties and was institutionalized shortly after her birth fifty years earlier. Over the years Jack barely acknowledged her existence but Amy faithfully visited her weekly, even though June had no idea of who she was or why she visited.
Through frequent flashbacks that stretch across six decades, the stories of the events that brought these people to this point in their lives slowly unfold, ultimately revealing the importance of friendship and love.
Principal cast
Production
According to the film's official website, producer Elisabeth Robinson and screenwriter/director Fred Schepisi were preparing a feature film about Don Quixote in 1997 when she brought Graham Swift's novel to his attention. The two acquired the film rights to the book, and Schepisi begin to work on his adaptation, completing the first draft of the script by February 1998. Schepisi met potential cast members and forged commitments with Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Bob Hoskins, and Ray Winstone.
Nik Powell, head of the independent production company Scala, signed on as an executive producer and during the summer of 2000 brought in German-based Rainer Mockert and MBP to help with the financing. Principal photography began in October of that year and lasted nine weeks. Locations included the London areas of Peckham and Bermondsey, Eastbourne, Canterbury, Chatham, Margate, and Rochester. Interiors were shot at the Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.
Release
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2001 and was shown at the San Sebastián Film Festival, the Warsaw Film Festival, the Reykjavik Film Festival, and the London Film Festival before opening in the US on 7 December 2001. The film went into theatrical release in the UK on 11 January 2002.
The film grossed $2,329,631 in the US and $4,544,261 in foreign markets for a total worldwide box office of $6,873,892.
Critical reception
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a score of 79% based on 91 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "With a cast that includes some of the best acting talent in Britain, Last Orders is a rewarding character-driven ensemble piece." On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 78 out of 100 based on 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
A.O. Scott of The New York Times observed, "For Mr. Schepisi . . . the principal challenge must have been how to translate the specific gravity of Mr. Swift's prose, with its multiple narrators and its stripped-down cockney lyricism, into the light and shadow of cinema . . . [He] has succeeded beyond all expectation . . . In the past Mr. Schepisi has used his elegant, unassuming visual sense and his instinctive feel for the idiosyncrasies of actors to open up the works of playwrights like David Hare (Plenty) and John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation). Last Orders, though quite different in theme and structure, shares with these films a quiet, amused wonder at the complexities of human character, and a reluctance to shoehorn them into narrative conventions or deduce obvious morals."