Liam Neeson goes to Tuscany - and this film goes nowhere

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This was published 3 years ago

Liam Neeson goes to Tuscany - and this film goes nowhere

By Jake Wilson

MADE IN ITALY

Written and directed by James D’Arcy, 94 minutes, rated M

Selected cinemas ★½

I’ve seen duller films this year than Made in Italy, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a less competent one. Almost certainly, this touristic tale of reconciliation between father and son would never have come into existence if the script hadn’t been seized on by Liam Neeson as a chance to appear alongside his actual son Micheal Richardson. I can only hope this real-life bonding exercise was more satisfying than what appears on screen.

Made in Italy was written and directed by English actor James D’Arcy, whose face you might recognise even if you can’t pick where you’ve seen him. He turns up often on British TV, and is the kind of good-looking “spare man” often used to fill out a blockbuster cast, as in Dunkirk and Avengers: Endgame; he was also an excellent Anthony Perkins in the 2012 film Hitchcock.

Liam Neeson championed the script as a chance to appear alongside his son.

Liam Neeson championed the script as a chance to appear alongside his son.Credit: IFC Films

But as a filmmaker he’s a beginner – and this inexperience is evident right from the opening scene between Jack, the London art dealer played by Richardson, and Ruth (Yolanda Kettle), the wife he’s soon to divorce. This sets up the plot, in a rote way, but we learn so little then or later about what went wrong in the marriage we can hardly process the situation as anything but pure dramatic contrivance.

Jack’s gallery is owned by Ruth’s family, meaning he’s set to lose his job as well as his wife unless he can buy the business. As a last resort, he seeks out his estranged dad Robert (Neeson), a once-celebrated artist, and proposes selling the Tuscan villa where their family lived in happier days when Jack’s Italian mother was still alive. So the bickering pair set off for Italy, where they spend much of the movie restoring this valuable but decaying property to a marketable state.

These are not so much “First World problems” as the problems of a particular subset of the First World confined to a handful of suburbs in London. In theory there’s no reason we couldn’t be made to care about such matters, but D’Arcy is ill-equipped to make the sale, even with our knowledge that the backstory of the script echoes the sudden death in 2009 of Natasha Richardson, Neeson’s wife and Richardson’s mother.

This is one of those films that gives the strong impression of a director out of his depth while an experienced crew do their best to save appearances. Many scenes look to be pieced together from fragmentary material shot on different occasions, with post-dubbed dialogue used to smooth over the gaps. Father and son seem adrift from each other, often stranded in separate shots and seldom making eye contact – an effect that might be realistic but can’t be viewed as wholly intentional.

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As a writer, D’Arcy is no more capable than he is as a director: none of the strained banter between the leads is remotely funny. Neeson, not a natural comic in any case, is hampered by the fact that Robert, supposedly an eccentric bohemian, hasn’t been supplied with any amusing eccentricities (unless you count his distrust of modern technology – there are recurring jokes about phone apps).

Still, there's no doubt of Neeson's personal investment in the project, which lets him bring a degree of emotional conviction to cliches like “I think about her every day.” As a screen presence, he dominates his son, who at most is blandly presentable in an apologetic British manner – despite the efforts to play up his sex appeal, including a romp in a lake that suggests a date night scenario on the UK edition of The Bachelor.

As a posh real estate agent who comes in and out, Lindsay Duncan is at least able to furnish a corner of the film and make it her own, the asperity of her delivery belying her witless lines. Otherwise, there’s the Tuscan scenery to enjoy – and the work of the young artist Annie-Rose Fiddian Green, who makes the most of the assignment of supplying Robert’s fictional abstract paintings, including a deep red mural splattered over a wall of the villa, prominently featured as a symbol of his enduring grief. That wall has more personality than anything else in the movie.

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