Quartet succeeds with carefully crafted wit
Q uartet is another solid entry in the emerging elder dramedy genre ( Hope Springs The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ) that doesn’t go for boner gags and cantankerous grumbling. (Not that there’s anything wrong with either of those things.) Rather first-time director Dustin Hoffman deals with the hopes and fears of older folks with honesty forgoing cheap shots and relying instead on solid performances and carefully crafted wit. The result is utterly charming.
The film is set in Hedsor House an enormous and stately old mansion (and its surrounding grounds) nestled deep in the English countryside that now serves as a retirement home for opera singers and musicians. That such a place could possibly exist seems ridiculous but who knows — maybe the British treat their elderly better than we do. As the film opens the residents are busy preparing for their yearly concert a celebration of all things Verdi. It’s a big deal as the proceeds keep their magical musical elderly community running for yet another year.
Best pals Wilf (Billy Connolly) Reginald (Tom Courtenay) and Cissy (Pauline Collins) are busy practising making the rounds and visiting pals. It’s bucolic to the extreme — a man practising his clarinet by a bubbling brook gazebos filled with grey-haired string quartets — the ideal place for a gang of British folks with snobby tastes and the countenance to match. (Actually the film is at pains to try and rectify the pretentiousness of classical music — in a cute and semi-awkward scene opera is likened to hip-hop.)
All is well until Jean (Maggie Smith) arrives at the home. The news is like a bomb and all the residents are atwitter — Jean was once a famous opera diva leaving failed marriages and friendships in her wake. She was once married to Reginald who’s none too happy to see her — she cheated on him way way back in the day and he’s never forgiven her.
As she begins to reconnect with her old pals the director of the musical extravaganza (Michael Gambon) comes up with a brilliant idea: the reuniting of Wilf Reginald Cissy and Jean who were once one of opera’s most famous quartets. They’ll perform at the concert and the retirement home will rake in thousands of necessary pounds.
Obviously things go awry on the way to the stage as Jean hasn’t sung in years. (Not to mention Cissy’s quickly gaining senility.) It isn’t the machinations of the plot that make Quartet so enjoyable however — Hoffman is more interested in the details that make the retirement home a living busy community and lingers just long enough on all of the principal characters to make them more than puppets of generalized elderly tropes. The cast is uniformly great: Connolly is hilarious a dirty old man fond of cracking raunchy jokes though wiser than he seems; Courtenay is stately and serious nursing age-old wounds; Collins stays just inside of being a caricature heartbreaking as a sweet old lady losing her grip; and Smith manages to expose the cruelty of her character without pinning her down as a hateful villain.
Hoffman puts it all together with a workmanlike craft which suits the picture giving it a more documentary-like quality that lets the audience peek in on the various details that add up to the residents’ lives. Really Quartet isn’t all that profound its main lesson being that some of us face old age with dignity and some don’t. Still the film somehow feels immune to cynicism. Whether that’s due to the performances and the handful of professional musicians that make up the rest of the cast or to pure sentimentality I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. This is a classy flick.
