Ordinary Love stars Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson as a long-married couple whose lives are disrupted when she is diagnosed with breast cancer. Not very Christmassy, you might think, but it’s not a ‘cancer story’, as has been said in some quarters, it’s a love story, told profoundly and beautifully and honestly rather than cloyingly or sentimentally. Chances are, it may even stay with you longer than any Richard Curtis film. I can’t guarantee it, but am quietly confident this will be so.
The screenplay is by the Northern Irish playwright Owen McCafferty whose own wife, Peggy, underwent breast cancer treatment, and the film is directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn. Set in Belfast, it takes us from one Christmas to the next, with Manville playing Joan and Neeson playing Tom and first things first: how often do you see middle-aged love stories on screen? Almost never, so in its way this is quite radical. What’s more, Joan and Tom are still loving and have sex and everything (imagine!) and although they’ve experienced a great sadness (as we later discover) their world is now each other and they are content with that.
They have their routines, like their brisk evening walk, and they still make each other laugh as when they’re in the supermarket and she teases him about his tomato-juice habit. ‘Can’t you just eat more tomatoes?’ Their lives are not exciting. The addition of Worcester sauce to their lunchtime soup is an event. But all this lived-in comfort and ease is shattered when she is in the shower and discovers a lump in her breast.
Joan undergoes a year of treatment. Surgery, chemo, the works. The cancer nurses and technicians are all real cancer nurses and technicians so that all feels true, as does so much else.
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