Second Best (1994)

Watched ‘Second Best’ (1994) on Primevideo.

A British film based on a novel by the same name.

A grim, bleak and sad movie. I wouldn’t say poignant or moving, just a sad movie.

The gray climate of England doesn’t help in the uplifting of the mood.

Graham (William Hurt) is a 42 year old unmarried man who wishes to adopt a son. James (Chris Cleary Miles) is the one he chooses. 

Where he lives in England, the adoption process is a long drawn one, where an agent from the children’s home will supervise the meetings between prospective father and son and decide whether the adoption must go through.

While Graham is making the best effort, its not easy, because James is a troubled child because of memories from childhood, and memories of a father he absolutely loves, and is unable to let go of. The father was taken away by the police after he was allowed to spend some memorable quality time with his son.

Graham himself hasn’t had a normal childhood. His parents loved each other a lot but they were so full of themselves that they barely had time for him. Because f this, Graham is not very expressive of his feelings; in fact, he hasn’t experienced deep or intense feelings because of the distance there always was between himself and his parents and the little or no opportunities that the small town offered to socialize.

Graham clings to the memory of one time he spent with his father on a beach and loves his father entirely with that memory and nothing else. The father is bedridden with stroke and he cares for him.

The film shows how the two, Graham and James, get to accept one another. Graham gropes his way towards the child, coping with emotions he hasn’t quite felt before. While James must get over the resistance he feels to loving someone else as his father, especially after his own father had exacted a promise from him that he would love him and no one else.

A miserly and taciturn screenplay that hides more than it reveals, or reveals in scraps. Even in the end, it is not clear what it was with James’s mother, what led to her dying in the bathtub. 

The theme of adoption provides enormous scope to portray the coming together of an adult and a child, each trying to win the other’s heart, trying to accept one another; it could have been very touching, moving. But it ends in what seems like a very reluctant compromise…like a debt that had to be paid, there being no choice.

For all it's critical acclaim, I was waiting for the movie to be over.

Lines I noted…

(about adoption) 

‘Sometimes, you have a child of 9 or 10 who is stuck emotionally at 2 or 3 because he may have been caught up in social services' favourite game - pass the parcel’

‘You do realize that as a single man, you'll only be offered the older, most difficult to place, emotionally disturbed boy?’

‘The department will allot someone to assess you in your own home’

‘8:59 on the dot, I take up position behind the reinforced counter screen’

‘Married bliss! Doesn't it want to make you throw up?’

‘I'd expect you to look after me when I'm old and decrepit. You realize that's the only reason I'm doing this don't you?’

‘The sense of being beholden to me, must be very painful to you’

‘Did you know that the moon moves further away from the earth by a foot every 20 years?’

‘Anything is possible Jamie, except feeling nothing’

#westerncinema