The English have a welcome ability to make whimsically meaningful films that get right into your heart, which while they may be a little sentimental and comically cute at times, restore faith in audiences that life can be more than a thousand kinds of negatively awful.
The more cynical among us might throw these kinds of films into the cinematic dustbin, but for those of use who need a gently humourous reminding of the good things in life such as family, belonging, love and hope, they are a tonic for our now-pandemic, climate change and war-ravaged souls.
At first glance, the trailer for The Last Bus suggests that this is another in a long line of delightful British cinematic treats, an idiosyncratically heartrending story of one very old man’s journey from John O’Groats up in Scotland all the way to he and his just-diseased wife’s old home at Land’s End in Cornwall to scatter her ashes.
A sad journey to be sure but if it follows the template of many other films, and you expect it will, he’ll meet a mixed cast of eccentric kind, strange or caring souls along the way, all of whom will remind him he is not alone at perhaps the loneliest, if most meaningful, time of his life.
While kind and thoughtful folks are encountered by Tom (Timothy Spall as older Tom, Ben Ewing as younger Tom) on his unusually-executed trip via local buses – he re-enacts in reverse the bus journey they took back in 1952 when they fled Land’s End after a great personal tragedy meant their hometown had too many dark memories for Tom’s wife Mary (Phyllis Logan as older Mary, Natalie Mitson as younger Mary) – The Last Bus is a tenderly raw and darkly meditative affair that isn’t shy about departing from a typical quirkily heartwarming script.
In fact, there are a great many times when you think the film is going to surrender to the warm and fuzzies of Tom becoming a viral social media sensation – he does, filmed as he is by many people throughout his travels but the effect on Tom is negligible to no-existent; he simply wants to get Mary home and nothing else matters – or subsume his story in the milk of selfless human kindness as strangers help Tom on his way but The Last Bus, like Tom himself, is resolute and sticks to its goal of telling an interior story that just happens to take place on a very public, long 970km journey from one end of the UK to the other.
While the film does tend to be a little slow at times, this is by no means a terrible flaw since the goal of the film is to stick close to Tom and witness both his current circumstances but also life as it was when he was younger when he and Mary leave Land’s End for John O’Groats, the weight of a terrible loss pressing down upon them.
Rather than unimaginatively shoving the exposition in-between the various stages of Tom’s bus-borne odyssey, director Gillies MacKinnon, working to a screenplay by Joe Ainsworth, chooses to weave memories and recollections of times gone by, both happy and sad, into the modern day.
Thus, we witness old Tom, his precious suitcase in hand walking into John O’Groats to catch his first bus, seem to pass by a quietly sad younger Tom and Mary walking in the other direction to start their new unwanted life.
Time and again, the past and the present poignantly intermingle in a screenplay that understands that while time may go in only direction, our thoughts and memories rarely do, especially when like Tom the past has rushed to meet the present, swirling everything together like flotsam bobbing after a raging storm.
Spall as old Tom is perfectly cast, a man who has lost everything but who is determined to fulfill one last promise to his beloved before time runs out for him too; life may be running out for him but he is not about to let him take this one last act of free agency with it.
A thousand miles, literally as it eventually turns out, from the sweetly eccentric film you might be expecting, director Gillies MacKinnon, The Last Bus is a rich and affectingly immersive film that places raw, meaningful humanity at the heart of its story every step of the way.
Without once being twee, The Last Bus is honest and truthful about life in all its many manifestations, both past and present, joyous and heartbroken, alive with kindness and thoughtfulness and awash in the cruelty of people like the bus driver who kicks Tom off in the middle of freezing moorland when he finds out his bus pass isn’t valid or the thief Tom encounters at one point.
For all its willingness to be unstinting about life’s potential for darkness and loss, reflected in some desperately lonely passages when Tom looks so bereft and alone that you want to hug him tight and drive him to Land’s End yourself, The Last Bus is also a reassuring delight with Tom temporarily becoming part of the lives of people like Peter and Tracy (Steven Duffy and Patricia Panther respectively) or Ukrainian woman Maria (Susannah Laing) who’s birthday party Tom becomes a part of after one of the bleakest days of his trip.
One of the loveliest scenes in the film begins as one of its most uncertain, with Tom surrounded by drunk male football fans and hen’s party girls, all of whom are quieted to an unusual late night bus stop reverence when Tom, encouraged by a mournful drunk man almost his age, sings “Amazing Grace” and literally stops everyone in their tracks.
It is emblematic of a film that isn’t given to overblown statement or emotionally manipulative impulses, preferring instead, quietly and with a poetic nuance that embraces life as it is, good and bad alike, to let Tom be the centre of attention, an assuming man of singular focus whose only focus is the one he has had all his life which is to do the right thing by his beautiful wife.
The Last Bus is almost mournfully ruminative at times, but it always present Tom as a full-realised man of decency, respect for others and uncommon bravery who even at the darkest, near-final point of his life is committed to doing the right thing by others who in return do the right thing by him (mostly but not always) and whose singular devotion to the love of his life rings true with a moving truthfulness that seizes your heart at the outset and never really lets it go.