Other Doctor Lives: Ashes (2012)

I saw this Jodie Whittaker film a while back but didn’t get around to writing my review until recently, so my memories aren’t as fresh as they ought to be. It’s a decent enough drama/thriller with some genuinely good twists, even if it’s not my type of film on the whole.

Frank lives in a secure ward in a nursing home, but someone has come to take him out of there. Struggling with dementia, he doesn’t recognize James, this man in front of him explaining that he’s Frank’s son. Frank’s condition makes it difficult for James to manage the situation, as Frank is fading in and out of reality but remains both stubborn and remarkably tenacious. Not everything, though, is what it seems.

The themes of an Alzheimer’s patient struggling with what’s real brings The Father to mind, and while that’s unsurprisingly a better-made film, the two movies are so different that I really wasn’t thinking of the one as I watched the other. While Ashes delves a little into what’s happening in Frank’s head, the story on the whole focuses more on the external, on Frank’s attempts to give his apparent abductor the slip and James’s efforts to keep him from running off. The full picture of what’s going on emerges by degrees, drawing on concrete flashbacks as well as fragments of Frank’s jumbled memories mixing with his present, and we come to learn just how complicated the situation is.

Plenty of older actors have gone to town playing someone with dementia, and Ray Winstone (lately Dreykov in Black Widow) goes all in on that action as Frank. It comes through that he was a formidable man in his better years, someone who left a lot of trouble in his wake, but his present state makes it hard for those in his life to get any kind of closure from him. Jim Sturgess, who I know mainly for being a whitewashing frequent flyer (in 21 and Cloud Atlas, the latter of which features him in “artistic” yellowface, ugh) plays James, a perennial screw-up who’s really gotten himself in over his head and trying to salvage it. The film also features Lesley Manville, who I remember from Phantom Thread a few years ago, and Luke Evans (who can make up these endless refrains like Gaston??)

Jodie Whittaker plays Ruth, James’s wife. It’s another bummer of a “long-suffering love interest” role for her. In this one, she has to deal with the fallout of James’s bad decisions and try to keep things afloat. He keeps letting her down, but she still keeps getting pulled back in by him. Whittaker injects the role with as much honesty as she can, but it’s a small part written very generically.

Accent Watch

I had to go back to the film on Amazon Prime and rewatch a couple of her scenes because I couldn’t even remember. Sounds like a decentish London accent to my ear.

Recommend?

In General – A tentative maybe. There’s some interesting stuff going on, and it’s a different take than the usual heartbreaking family drama about Alzheimer’s.

Jodie Whittaker – Naw. Whittaker does fine with what she’s given, but what she’s given isn’t much.

Warnings

Violence, sexual references, language, gross-out moments, and strong thematic elements.