Who would have thought Lord Dunsany would get a film adaptation in 2010? Even in these post-Potter, post-Jackson-LOTR days when fantasy is enjoying a filmic boom, he’s hardly the author you’d expect to be the beneficiary of a decent film budget. And even then, would his short 1936 novel, My Talks with Dean Spanley, be the one to choose over something more flashy and Hollywood-friendly, like, say, The Sword of Welleran or The King of Elfland’s Daughter? As fantasy goes, Spanley is really quite mild, being about a dean who, under the influence of his favourite wine, Tokay (which has something of a fantasy pedigree, as it appears in the first chapter of Pullman’s Northern Lights, too), falls into reminiscences of his previous life as a dog. No car chases, no fights, no massive effects sequences — no effects sequences at all, as far as I could tell. No romance, either. The cast is all male, apart from one ageing housekeeper.
But what a charming film!
Partly this is down to the excellent cast. Peter O’Toole is the frankly frightening Horatio Fisk, an unforgiving, staunchly unemotional old man, teetering on the awkward edge between wilful rudeness and outright dementia. Jeremy Northam is his son, painfully trying to get his father to open up just a little bit about the deaths of Northam’s brother (during the war) and his mother (afterwards, from grief). Sam Neill is the rather unsociable Dean Spanley whose Tokay-induced reminiscences have to be coaxed out of him, but who, once going, provides a wonderful insight into the life and worldview of a dog, and his relationship to “the master”.
But also, the film’s particular charm comes down to that rare thing in films these days, particularly fantasy ones (he says, having recently reviewed the Clash of the Titans remake) — a story that’s not only good, but which is allowed time to breathe, to develop, to gather momentum, to bring out its subtle emotional undercurrents and let them build into full-size waves. At first, I must admit, the story was so slight I wasn’t sure there was even going to be one. Just how much, after all, can you get from the reminiscences of a closemouthed dean about a previous canine incarnation? But before I knew it, the gentle pace, mild manners and the sheer, quiet, confidence of the film won me over, and suddenly I found it was packing a real emotional punch. In one scene near the end, Peter O’Toole’s face, so impassive, not to say death-like at the beginning, suddenly — and so subtly — thaws, with just the tiniest of shifts in expression, and suddenly the whole tone of the film is changed.
Really a lovely film.
, apparently dating from 2007, though it must have appeared on Amazon only recently. It’s a no-frills digipack (it would have been nice to have had a lyrics booklet and something about the history of the album), but at least the music is there. And the music is, I’m glad to say, very good.
