Fans of this British comedy/drama get really attached to it and I guess I’m one of them because I’ve seen it several times. Most of those times were on cable TV in the early 90s, but a fresh viewing here in our crumbling 21st century was fun, too. It’s not a great movie, but it’s cozy. A group of old college friends get together for a ten-year reunion around New Year’s Eve. They’ve barely seen each other in all that time so the past is still in the room, but the film is really about the present and where these people are today. It’s both a small story about friendship and, if you can be bothered about it, a larger story about what a decade (the 80s) has wrought.
Money hasn’t bought happiness. Marriage is fragile, but being single is no party either, even when it looks like one. After ten years of living and growing, everyone’s still lost. Every generation is sold a pack of illusions about their future and then spends their 20s and 30s reckoning with that.
What’s the solution? Good friends, old memories, sudden shocks that make your problems look small and put everything into perspective.
None of that is extraordinary, but that’s not the kind of film that this is or what it wants to be. It wants to be that comfortable old shirt, right down to its sledgehammer soundtrack moments. Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend” plays as everyone hugs and gabs together again for the first time. Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” sounds off as these characters’ vulnerabilities begin to sink in for us.
Director/actor Kenneth Branagh was a celebrated actor of the English stage from very early on and directed a film version of Shakespeare’s Henry V that earned him Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Actor at age 29. In 1989, they were calling him the new Laurence Olivier. After that, Branagh tried new things. He didn’t want to just be the Shakespeare guy. He followed up Henry V with Dead Again, a mainstream Hollywood thriller and then he followed up that with Peter’s Friends, a nostalgic ensemble piece with old friends, a seasoned cast who actually DID know each other back in 1982. All of that only adds to this film’s warmth.
Branagh directs like a stage actor, even. LOTS of master shots here. His camera likes to hang back and let actors do what they do. Every cut really means something.