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My Sailor, My Love
James Cosmo in ‘My Sailor, My Love’
It’s challenging, caring for elders while holding a job and maintaining your own marriage. Moreso when the unhealed wounds of the past reopen under stress. The situation is prime fodder for Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Happily, My Sailor, My Love complicates the expected plot line with unusual emotional intelligence and appreciation for the human condition. Our sympathies shift from one character to another and another again.
As the film begins, the aging father, Howard (James Cosmo) is curmudgeonly and cruel to his daughter Grace (Catherine Walker), rebuffing her efforts at kindness, even refusing to touch the birthday cake she brought for him. One wonders if the light of his consciousness is dimming into senescence, yet he brightens with the arrival of his sons and becomes a charming storyteller at the pub, entertaining children and adults with tales of his life as a merchant sea captain.
Finnish director Klaus Härö sets My Sailor, My Love in a remote Irish coastal town whose craggy shore is topped with patches of grass, barely sustaining the grazing sheep. In this barren and beautiful landscape, Howard lives in a house at the end of a gravel lane overlooking the sea. But local color aside, the story by screenwriters Jimmy Karlsson and Kirsi Vikman is universal and could unfold anywhere.
One reason for Howard’s contempt for Grace and her husband, Martin (Aidan O’Hare) is justified suspicion that his daughter is laying plans to commit him to a senior center, stripping him of independence. Howard is also hostile to the housekeeper Grace hired to cook and clean, a widow of his own age, Annie (Brid Brenna), assuming she’s in on the plot. Feeling diminished, he throws his ship captain’s uniform into the garbage and, next day, orders Annie to never “darken my door again.” But after kicking her out, he discovers a dry cleaner bag hanging on his coat hook, his uniform, pressed and cleaned, billed to Annie. His subtle reaction is registered on his face, seen in the hallway mirror.
Much of My Sailor, My Love’s success is owed to the cast, whose pinpoint characterizations bring their characters fully to life. All are recognizably human and flawed, as well as resistant to lazy stereotyping. Their backstories are revealed slowly. Grace’s kindness toward her father conceals bitterness because of the old man’s long absences at sea, which left her as caregiver to her clinically depressed mother. Martin is tired of the time Grace spends with Howard as well her controlling nature and their marriage is fraying. Howard tends toward selfishness and irresponsibility but as his relations with Annie ripen into close friendship (one that avoids Hollywood golden age cliches), he reveals a caring, concerned side. Annie had endured an abusive marriage that left no scars, only caution in allowing another man into her life.
There are no heroes or villains in My Sailor, My Love, only flawed people who, though they have no bad intentions, stumble through their emotional landscapes with mixed outcomes.
My Sailor, My Love debuts on digital platforms, Oct. 24.
