Film Review: 45 YEARS

A typical moment with Kate and Geoff. (Get used to it.)

Oh my God. What a drag. Obviously the title 45 Years refers to how long it feels sitting there watching it. One good thing was that I saw it in a movie/cafe sort of place so I had a hefty glass of Cabernet to keep me company and make it more palatable. If you choose to see it, bring along a flask of whiskey or something, I beg of you.

The two British leads -- Charlotte Rampling, the formerly stunning young star now a fading bloom, and Tom Courtenay, ditto -- are an elderly retired couple, Kate and Geoff, about to celebrate their forty-fifth anniversary. A party is being planned. Geoff gets a letter about his long-dead girlfriend's frozen body being found in a crevasse in Switzerland where she fell while on a hiking trip with him long before he met Kate. This news sends him into a tizzy. He starts smoking again and thinking about what might have been. Kate gets jealous (of a dead woman?) and takes long, foggy walks in the country with their dog.

They have the anniversary party. Geoff says to their unbelievably enormous crowd of friends who have all managed to stay alive well into their dotage that marrying Kate was the best thing he ever did, but she's still pissed because he had already admitted that he would have married the dead girl if she had lived. So even though he's all happy and sweet to her at the party, quite adorable really, dancing to the old love song they played at their wedding, she won't forgive him and harshly snaps her hand away from his, like that's supposed to mean something incredibly deep. The end.

That's it, folks. I mean really. Don't bother.