By David Elliott
MOVIE CRITIC

April 13, 2006

A movie from a woman, about male reserve and the cost of it, “On a Clear Day” has some real value on tap. But not quite enough.

Focus Features Peter Mullan (left) is Frank, a bloke who's lost his job and his hope. Then, he has a great idea: He'll swim the English Channel with help from his pals.

Starring Peter Mullan, whose performance as the recovering alcoholic in “My Name Is Joe” was one of the great ones of the 1990s, Gaby Dellal's film is occupied by a fine cast. But isn't that the general rule in British movies?

As Frank, a shipyard foreman (or team leader) made “redundant” and thus “let go” after a ship is launched, Mullan is a flexing fist. He hates those weasel terms and what they signify: that he's getting older; that the company is heartless; that the brooding strength and terse decisiveness that made him so admired by other – mostly aging – workers are what have made him, for management, an expendable rivet.

MOVIE REVIEW “On a Clear Day” Rated PG-13; Opens tomorrow ½

Out of work, he can't bring himself to fill out the paperwork for unemployment relief. He is balled up with undirected rage and has a “panic attack” on the street, then feels shamed. He can barely open up even to his grandkids.

Alex Rose's script hauls up subtext. Frank is tormented by memory of a dead child, so much so that he walls himself off emotionally from his living son (fine Jamie Sives). The sweet wife-mom, Joan (Brenda Blethyn), frets but can't even suggest therapy (Blethyn reins in the emotional spillage that made her a virtual therapy marathon in “Secrets & Lies”).

Frank's rescue is in his “crazy” scheme. A good swimmer, he decides to cross the English Channel under his own muscle power, with pals rooting him on in a nearby boat. They are a matey bunch, and the movie milks fetching humor from their collusion with Frank's venture, while Joan shows her own form of middle-aged gumption.

“On a Clear Day” has the English (and Scottish) delight in shared foibles and comradeship. Jodhi May, Benedict Wong and Billy Boyd stitch in their useful charms, and the rugged Channel gentles just enough for Frank (not looking terribly fit, or very greased) to make his bid for masculine redemption.

Sadly, Rose's script has its own form of redundancy. The social, economic and personal stresses don't seem very surely addressed by the big swim. And must we have it tied quite so neatly into the fate of the lost son?

Movies like this, nicely fitted with good sentiments, rely too much on us wishing the characters well. You can feel your soul, or the surface of it, being tapped for a donation, so that to resist seems a little churlish and even downright misanthropic.

If you make “The Old Man and the Sea,” you had better have a deep surge of manly, mythic resonance (Old Hem insists). If you make “The Midlife Man and the Channel,” you're in shallower water, bobbing along.

  

A Focus Features release at Landmark La Jolla Village. Director: Gaby Dellal. Writer: Alex Rose. Cast: Peter Mullan, Brenda Blethyn, Billy Boyd, Jodhi May, Benedict Wong. Running time: 1 hr., 38 min.

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