Review of ‘The Great Escaper’ (Oliver Parker, 2023)
‘The Great Escaper’ is an elegiac swan song for Glenda Jackson, who died before the film’s release, and arguably up there too with Michael Caine’s finest work in this based-on-a-true-story account of navy veteran Bernard Jordan (Caine) who became something of a cause celebre when he furtively escaped from his care home in 2014 in order to attend the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings. With all his belongings in a small blue carrier bag he made his way from his home in Brighton to cross the Channel and pay his respects on the other side to those who had lost their lives during the War.
What could have been played as a comedy caper is, though, a richly textured study of the impulses we all have to carry out a cause, often against all odds, and notwithstanding the risks. Bernie needs to make peace with his past and knows that this is likely to be his last chance to follow through on his ambition, in a pilgrimage and odyssey that is all about the integrity of not letting go of our connection to the past and the guilt of, as here, surviving an ordeal which entailed the perishing of others. Caine and Jackson — in real life having quite different political leanings, with Caine famously leaving the UK in the 1970s during the Labour Government’s high income tax policy, and Jackson a renowned Labour MP for over two decades from 1992 until 2015 — are mesmerizing as a husband and wife approaching 90 who realize that their better days are distinctly behind them.
Bernie strikes up a rapport with a German veteran who, seventy years earlier, would have been an enemy, and he manages also to help a fellow veteran with a drinking problem and a younger veteran suffering PTSD from the Iraq War whom he meets on the ferry from Portsmouth. Jackson plays Irene back at the care home who also intervenes to help one of her carers who might be battling some demons of her own and she is acutely aware of the past that is ebbing away from her on the tide of time and history. She has her own nostalgia-fuelled drive to navigate the past and allow her husband his final shot at atoning for what has happened.
At times this film meshes with that of Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton’s similar tale of last chances and past regrets in ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’, also concerning a man of advancing years who is compelled to undertake a journey which rationally makes no sense but emotionally is laden with the need to make amends before it is too late. There are several brief flashbacks during ‘The Great Escaper’ but these feel tacked on and are not really well integrated into the story which doesn’t require them as Caine and Jackson do so much just through their facial expressions to convey how their lives have unfolded and how war had such a paradoxical effect on the collective psyche.
