Dunsany movie hailed as 'film of week"

Film critic Michael O"Dwyer described 'Dean Spanley", the movie based on Lord Dunsany"s 'My Talks With Dean Spanley" as the film of the week on RTE at the weekend. Peter O"Toole and Sam Neill play leading roles in the movie which went on general release at the weekend. Reincarnation and reconciliation form the heart of the new feature comedy-drama inspired by the 1936 novella. Set in Edwardian England, it follows a father and son as they encounter the eponymous eccentric, a man-of-the-cloth who claims to have had a rather strange past life. Henslowe Fisk (Jeremy Northam) and his ailing father, Horatio Fisk (Peter O"Toole), go to a lecture given by the Swami Nala Prash (Art Malik) on reincarnation, called 'The Transmigration of Souls". While there, they meet one Dean Spanley (Sam Neill) as well as Wrather (Bryan Brown), a self-described facilitator from the colonies. Later encountering the Dean at his father"s club, and then in the grounds of the cathedral, Henslowe takes this to be more than coincidence and decides to ask the man to dinner, enticing him with the promise of his favourite tipple Imperial Tokay, a rare Hungarian sweet wine. Using Wrather to procure a bottle, Henslowe begins a series of dinners with Spanley, in which - after two glasses of the wine - the Dean begins to recount strange recollections of his past life. Incredulous at first, Henslowe becomes intrigued by the Dean"s clear-headed accounts of his days during his former life. But as these alcohol-induced investigations continue, it becomes clear that Dean Spanley has an intimate connection to someone close to Henslowe, a revelation that will ultimately prove incredibly cathartic for all concerned. Appropriately enough, My Talks With Dean Spanley began life at a dinner party, almost eight years ago. New Zealand-born producer Matthew Metcalfe was visiting a friend, when he slapped a short script on the table, penned by Scottish screenwriter Alan Sharp (Rob Roy), and asked Metcalfe to take a look. It was an adaptation of 'My Talks With Dean Spanley". 'I read the script, and thought it was amazing,' recalls Metcalfe, 'but it was fifty pages long and there wasn"t really anything you could do with it for a commercial point of view.' Two years went by, and Metcalfe was about to begin work on his most recent feature, the 2007 horror-thriller The Ferryman, when he had a Eureka moment. 'I literally sat bolt upright in the middle of the night and went 'Dean Spanley! I have an idea to make that into a feature film."' It meant tracking down the New Zealand-based Sharp, taking him to lunch and convincing him to turn his short script into a feature-length work. 'He was very sceptical about that, thinking it was really based on just a novella. So we went through this wonderful dance where he would write some more and I would say, 'Just make it ten pages longer - I know it can"t be a feature but just humour me!"' While many novellas lend themselves automatically to feature film adaptation, 'My Talks With Dean Spanley" was structured around a series of dinners between the titular Dean and the story"s narrator, Henslowe Fisk, during which the former recounts his life as a dog in a previous existence. 'That is where the book begins and ends,' says Metcalfe, but to expand the story, he and Sharp decided there had to be a reason why Fisk was continuing with his dinners with the Dean. 'Finally we went, 'Maybe he"s doing it because he wants to understand something important to him - he"s reaching out." That"s when the idea of the father came up.' Enter the character of Horatio Fisk, who not featured in Lord Dunsany"s original. As Sharp"s script reflects, it"s his strained relationship with his son, the narrator, which helps form the emotional arc of the film. Thus reincarnation is swapped for reconciliation. 'What it really reflects is that I think every father has, at some point, struggled to understand his son, while every son has struggled to understand his father,' says Metcalfe. 'It"s about how sons feel when their fathers don"t say they approve of them, or they appreciate them, or that they love them, or that they think they"re worthy. 'It"s about how fathers seems to struggle to communicate this to their sons, and how sons don"t feel they can pull their fathers up on this.'