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Audrey Kupferberg: Finding Your Feet

If I want to partake of unending violence, deception, and general mean-spiritedness, I’ll watch cable news. When I want to enjoy a good old-fashioned story about life – its trials, its happiness, and the love and friendship that make it worthwhile -- then I watch a feel-good movie. 

There aren’t many new, well-conceived movies in that genre.  Maybe the events and lifestyles of the 21st century are making feel-good movies obsolete.  Still, this month, I turned off news of Trump, Russia, and Korea for a couple hours in order to see a motion picture that left me with deep-felt ideas and, in the end, welcome feelings about life.

The feel-good movie experience happened in a local cineplex as I watched the newly-released British comedy/drama FINDING YOUR FEET.  Its storyline is filled with life’s ups and downs, beginning with a scene of an upper-class party.  Elitist wife Sandra, played by the incomparable Imelda Staunton, and her longtime husband have invited their well-dressed friends and colleagues to celebrate Sandra’s honorific title of Dame.  A few minutes into the film, we, along with Sandra, find hubby having more than a hug with Sandra’s best friend.  On the spot, Sandra ends their forty-year marriage.  Where can she go?  For some odd reason, she heads to London to live with her estranged older sister Bif, played by Celia Imre.

Now Sandra is rich.  She could check into the Savoy or the Dorchester.  But she moves into the cluttered little flat that Bif calls home.  The thing about this and other feel-good movies is, the plot doesn’t have to be logical.  It just has to move the characters from point A to B.  Point B is worth the wait because some of Britain’s finest actors -- actors who are thriving as they play one role after another, even though they have lived to pensioner status -- begin to take the stage.  Joanna Lumley, Timothy Spall, and David Hayman play working-class Londoners who become Sandra’s new friends as Bif, whose own lifestyle is disheveled but meaningful and fun, re-introduces her younger sister to a past love.  Not a man, but dancing!  This group of seniors gather regularly to tango and foxtrot, and there Sandra finds renewal. 

The screenplay has its moments of elation and sadness.  No detail of the script is highly creative, nor is it unique.  As I watched, I thought of other films that feature the same woeful life challenges and similar reasons for joy.   Each of the characters has an interesting story, and you’ve probably heard something like it before now. 

So why is this film so entertaining?  Well, the actors are incredibly good—especially Staunton, Imre, and Spall, and their characters are well written.  The pacing is superb; the story doesn’t linger on any event so the plot moves along briskly. Finally, the narrative touches upon details to which most of us who have passed into an age of maturity can relate.  We don’t want to have to think about life’s tribulations, but we know that they await us in one form or another. 

So, when a film can show us the complexities of living but also bring us to an opportune ending, it becomes a cinematic experience well worth having… and a bag of fresh, warm popcorn makes a feel-good movie like FINDING YOUR FEET even more pleasurable!

Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former Director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and has co-authored several entertainment biographies with her husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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