The Great Escaper: Glenda Jackson is utterly transfixing in her final film
When 89-year-old Bernard Jordan, a D-Day veteran, slipped out of his retirement home in Hove, crossed the channel, and made his way without fuss to the 70th anniversary celebrations of the Normandy Landings in June 2014, it took a whole day for anyone to bat an eyelid. He just wandered out in a raincoat and waited for a bus.
Michael Caine, in The Great Escaper, gives Bernard an unruffled nonchalance, but there’s steel under there: he keeps being told he’s “left it too late” to be ushered to France in an organised way by the Royal British Legion, so simply takes matters into his own hands. He feels he owes it to friends who died before his eyes.
Left behind at “The Pines” is his sole accomplice – his wife Irene (Glenda Jackson, in her final role), who has no trouble dodging and dissimulating for the time it takes him to reach the continent. These two have separate rooms, and a touching daily routine, whereby Irene refuses to let him in until she’s put on her make-up. When a preoccupied Bernard explains what he’s thinking of doing, she doesn’t stand in his way, and only gets anxious when the unexpected happens overnight: the news gets out online, and his story goes viral.
Oliver Parker’s retelling of this hero-for-a-day saga, with its salty script by William (Made in Dagenham) Ivory, could have been a lot cuddlier. I’m glad it isn’t. The film’s strength is its plainness and melancholy, as it sketches the history of a marriage – ardent, in times gone by, and still movingly dedicated. The brief flashbacks to Bernard’s hell on the beaches are tight glimpses, traumatic fragments, rather than some panorama he could never have witnessed – not just a prudent use of a budget, but an honest one.
Caine’s scenes with a fellow vet he meets on the crossing, an alcoholic played with low-key grace by John Standing, let both men open up about their demons. For the cameras, Bernard has to perform and smile, but the film resists the temptation to make his new-found fame any kind of reward: it’s all for show, a meretricious parade. Beneath this realisation, Caine finds layer after layer, going ever deeper.
The real gift of the film, modestly scaled in ways that wind up much less banal than I’d worried, is how much of a showing it gives Jackson – pottering around on her own in Bernard’s absence, kvetching at her nurses, and giving them real talk about how soon she’s going to die.
She’s utterly transfixing, a force of nature. When they bring her fish and chips, there’s certainly no need for any vinegar, given the tang of it she spits out with every line. Her rude vitality was undimmed to the last, and no one who appreciated Jackson as a performer can afford to miss this.
12A cert, 96 min