Quartet (***)

This cinematic comfort food reminds us that advanced age needn’t mean the end of a creative life. Perhaps that especially appealed to Dustin Hoffman, who does not appear as an actor but makes his belated debut as director with this drama set in a home for retired musicians. Adapting a play by Ronald Harwood (with a screenplay by Harwood), Hoffman has gathered some elite English actors—Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Michael Gambon, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins—to embody strong personalities. Hoffman and his cast make these characters appealing without making them “cute,” as other movies with aged characters sometimes do. Even Connolly’s character, whose frequent flirtations with the young, female doctor who runs the place are played for laughs, becomes more than a running gag.

The main plotline has to do with whether the titular “quartet” will reunite for a performance of Rigoletto, notwithstanding that one (Courtenay) does not wish to speak to another (Smith), and the other does not wish to perform. The former problem is resolved with so little fuss as to make it seem retrospectively trivial. Despite being the setting, the infirmities of old age play a fairly small role, yet Collins’s portrayal of a woman in the early throes of Alzheimer’s is one of the most touching I’ve seen. While the movie is not exactly full of surprises, Hoffman makes this a pleasant production and nicely supplements Harwood’s story by setting several scenes with lush English countryside as background. Of note, retired English musicians play bit parts and perform throughout.

IMDb link

viewed 2/27/13 4:55 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/4/13