Just the premise alone of “Nowhere Special” will make you choke up.
35-year-old single father John (James Norton) is terminally ill, so he needs to make plans for his toddler son’s life after he’s gone — that means adoption and finding him a new family. The film follows him and his unwitting son, Michael (Daniel Lamont), meeting with prospective parents who will shape his boy’s life.
You’re already tearing up, right? That is a five-hankie premise if ever there was one, but in the hands of writer-director Uberto Pasolini and lead actor Norton, it truly becomes a movie, not just a concept masquerading as one.
In the best tradition of Jim Sheridan and John Crowley, they build “Nowhere Special” from the smallest of moments: John telling Michael not to spill his cereal on the table, and Michael defiantly pushing one Cheerio off the edge of his plate anyway; John washing his car and Michael wanting to emulate his dad, so he washes his toy truck at the same time; stopping at an overpass to watch the cars go underneath; going grocery shopping together; Michael practicing his counting by putting the exact number of candles for his father’s age in a cake on his dad’s birthday; driving a bumper car and winning a prize at a carnival; bath time; reading a storybook together, and John’s eventual realization he doesn’t want to read kids-learning-about-death touchstone “When Dinosaurs Die” because he doesn’t want his son’s life to be defined by death. This is the stuff life is made of.
It’s to Pasolini’s credit that he does next to nothing to underscore the emotion of this scenario. There’s only the most thinly sketched backstory: John, a window washer in Northern Ireland, had a child with his Russian girlfriend, and she left the country to go back home upon his birth. Blink, and you’ll miss when John finishes writing a series of letters for his son to open at later stages of his life, such as “To Be Opened When You’ve Passed Your Driving Test.” We never see the moment of John’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Instead, the moment we first see him, he’s already at the acceptance stage of his grief — there literally isn’t a moment of crying, or an emotional breakdown, at all in the film. Cinematographer Marius Panduru never moves his camera for emphasis, nor does Pasolini — director of the melancholic Eddie Marsan vehicle “Still Life” — cut to heighten emotion. Either static or gently handheld, the camera doesn’t keep its distance either, getting in for close-ups of Norton’s face in particular as the finest grains of emotion slip through the strong facade he’s putting on for his son. Only a little piano from Andrew Simon McAllister’s wisp of a score puts any punctuation on some moments.
This is a great dad, and a portrait of fatherhood so powerful it practically makes you believe in fatherhood all over again. Norton is attractive even as his disease subtly starts to take its toll and he’s — unremarked upon — suddenly wearing knit caps, his face appearing a bit more weathered. But the film avoids “hot dad” tropes as well. You almost think that’s going to happen when a woman starts talking to him and Michael at the grocery store and says to Michael how lucky he is to have a dad who’s going to bake a cake. But that’s just that. There’s no real flirtation there, and romance and sex are things John appears to have put behind him. So many times you think a particular trope is going to be indulged, Pasolini avoids them.
Which isn’t to say some predictable elements still don’t wend their way into “Nowhere Special.” The succession of family auditions — there’s no better word for them based on the presentation here — for prospective adoptive parents runs the gamut of personality types. There’s a posh guy who’s already talking about sending Michael to boarding school; a couple whose sadness over not being able to have a child of their own is palpable; a family with seven children, and so on. This is where the film comes the closest to delivering “types” — it’s hard not to think of Diane Keaton auditioning adoptive parents in “Baby Boom.” And in “Nowhere Special,” you know instantly which one of these is “the right one.” The ending then is a tad predictable even with about 40 minutes left. Not to mention that there is also a social worker character who feels like every “well-meaning” social worker character you’ve ever seen in any movie.
But these are minor quibbles for a film so emotionally overwhelming yet understated in execution. How on earth has this movie not received a U.S. release until nearly four years after its Venice premiere? Was there a fear that the thick Northern Irish accents throughout are inaccessible to an American audience? Is the aversion to films about loss that profound? Pasolini’s next movie, “The Return,” an adaptation of “The Odyssey” starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, is likely getting a release from Bleecker Street this summer. At the very least, “Nowhere Special” is one of the great father-son movies. There’s truth behind these tears.
Grade: B+
“Nowhere Special” premiered in Horizons at the 2020 Venice Film Festival. It opens April 26 in New York and L.A. from Cohen Media Group, with a national rollout to follow.
