Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: John Madden
Starring: Rhys Ifans, Laura Linney, Monica Dolan, Rory Kinnear
Globally, every two minutes a person is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. So, in the time it takes to read this review, six people will have had their worlds and futures shattered by an unwelcome medical verdict. Except, not if YOU'RE reading it. As an above average literatus you'll probably take it all in a bit quicker, even the big words like contumelious, resulting in perhaps half the average diagnoses. So, that's progress. And yes gallows humour is the only way one can cope with such an awful prospect, an approach shared also by Onwards and Sideways, Paul Mayhew-Archer (screenwriter) and John Madden's (director) romantic drama focussing on two strangers diagnosed with the disease and the "five good years" which they both have left before what, let's face it, is most likely going to be an end which is in the least uninvited and undignified.
Mayhew-Archer was diagnosed with Parkinson's himself in 2011 and is an advocate for research and awareness of the condition. This gives Onwards and Sideways an authenticity which is at once fascinating but also pitiless in lack of sentimentality. It feels intimate and honest. Rhys Ifans plays Tony, a primary school teacher who is diagnosed in his fifties. As a widower he faces the disease alone except for his kinsperson, played by the great Monica Dolan giving prissy big sister vibes. As Tony hides the worst of the diagnosis, and completely keeps it from his employers, the sensation which Onwards and Sideways most clearly showcases is that of shame, as if sufferers who develop this condition naturally feel that it is their fault, which, along with the mortification of being a burden to others, leads to varying stages of denial. I'm not sure of Mayhew-Archer's employment history but making Tony a schoolteacher of children who are very little is an astute narrative move: teaching requires superhuman emotional constraint, an obligation towards stoicism which, say, being a music composer (the occupation of Emma, Tony's counterpart in the narrative) doesn't. Tony hides his worsening condition from SLT, leading to one of the film's more successful tragi-comic sequences: they think he's pissed on the job and stage an intervention.
Emma, the always fantastic Laura Linney, is a composer, and her diagnosis brings along with it the devastating practical implications of how motor dysfunction impacts performance and craft (although, in a repeated phrase, which speaks to the film's motivation to raise awareness and elucidate, Tony calmly explains that "not everyone" shakes when people seem nonplussed that he doesn't seem afflicted by this visual indictor). Following a meet cute which centres on the most absurdly petty-Brit circumstance of a car park quarrel, via the dichotomy of Tony and Emma the film presents different dimensions of Parkinson's and the ways in which people survive its debilitations.
Man, we slept on Rhys Ifans. Playing crumpled Tony, slightly defeated but still with a twinkle in his eye, he is affecting and heart-breaking. So kind to the children he teaches (there has always been something of the childlike about the actor) but clearly living in fear of a crushing unknown, Ifans gives perhaps the most quietly moving performance of the year. He is ably matched by Linney, who brings a no-nonsense, almost optimistic American acceptance of events (a stock in trade of hers following the TV show The Big C). The film affects a gentle pace, and along with Tony and Emma's experiences we see the awkwardness with which other people treat the condition, such as when Dolan, in a sequence of the black comedy which she is so good at, snatches Tony's birthday present to unwrap it herself - "we'll be here for ages otherwise"-!
Occasionally, an intertitle will ominously inform us of how many good years Emma and Tony have left, which had me whispering at the screen for the two of them to get over it and get it on. And it's interesting that the film positions us to cling to the timeworn dynamic of romantic union as an acceptable consolation for Tony and Emma, as in a way it mirrors the fairy tale hopes and dreams most of us subscribe to anyway. Watching Onwards and Sideways, we accept Parkinson's as a cruel acceleration of aging; a rapid loss of the faculties and independence which awaits us all, but not now, and not so quickly. The irony that when we are young we take drugs for recreation, but in old age to merely get by is attested to. In an attempt to get prescribed Viagra, it turns out the nurse assessing him is Tony's ex-student: she negotiates the situation with gentle aplomb, and Tony goes home to a happy Emma. Part of what makes Onwards and Sideways such a rewarding view is the film's insistence on how kind people generally are. We see this pointedly during an (unnecessary) gambling subplot, where Emma falls foul of debt collectors and other people rally round and refuse to judge. It is a refreshing representation, and worth being reminded of. Too responsible to offer any ending other than bittersweet, Onwards and Sideways' insistence on the compassion of people is nonetheless of much comfort.
Onwards and Sideways is in UK/ROI cinemas from November 6th.
