Nowhere Special review – tremendous James Norton performance lifts terminal illness drama | Film
James Norton, the actor who fastened up so well in TV’s McMafia that he immediately jumped to the highest of the listing to take over from Daniel Craig as James Bond, appears utterly completely different right here, and it took me some time to put him. Along with his neck tattooed, face gaunt and pale, Norton performs Belfast window cleaner John, a single dad who’s dying of mind most cancers. The film, impressed by precise occasions and directed by Italian film-maker Uberto Pasolini, is the story of John’s search to discover a household to undertake his four-year-old son Michael (Daniel Lamont). It’s tender and poignant, however may be a bit cloying have been it not for Norton, who underplays it superbly with a efficiency of great depth and empathy.
Firstly of the movie time is already operating out for John, whose ex walked out when Michael was a child. He has no household, so is working with social staff to interview potential mother and father. It’s a particular “no” to the smug poshos and the couple who inform him they have been hoping for a child, however effectively, , beggars and all that. One or two of the {couples} are sketched as cartoonishly terrible, which is a bit jarring. The place the movie actually comes alive is within the small particulars of on a regular basis life – together with one attractive second as John walks Michael to highschool, the digicam observing in some way each his heartache and pleasure holding fingers along with his son.
The movie will get dangerously near sentimental; what retains it attention-grabbing is the appearing. Lamont, who performs little Michael, is a pure. On the web page John is ever-so-slightly cliched; he matches the stereotype of the saintly working-class character whose personal troublesome childhood appears to have left him just about baggage-free, a heroic selflessly good dad or mum. And but despite myself I invested completely in Norton’s spine-tingling, intimate efficiency; and, despite myself, the tip had me in floods of tears.
