Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ordinary Love’ on Hulu, in Which Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson Endure, Endure and Endure

Shhhh: Ordinary Love is on Hulu. It’s a quiet, quiet drama, intimate, subtle, thoughtful. Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson play a retired couple in Ireland. She’s diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s just something they have to deal with. Treatments, surgery, medication. Will they get through it? They really don’t have much choice, do they?

ORDINARY LOVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Joan (Manville) and Tom (Neeson) regularly take walks — they’re brisk excursions but, being in their 60s, these people are slightly beyond sweaty vigor. They goof around a little; they hold hands. Later, they watch television, their feet tangled together on the footstool. Is he ever going to take down the Christmas decorations? She put them up, it just makes sense that he takes them down. They laugh. She showers, and feels something unusual on the side of her breast. She asks him to feel it. It’s not nothing. She’ll see the doctor tomorrow, then.

The doctor confirms it’s not nothing, and schedules her a hospital appointment for further testing. Tom drives her. They have to pay for parking at the hospital, Tom gripes; I’d reply, if he lived in America, his parking would be validated but the appointment might bankrupt them, but maybe that’s beside the point. She has a biopsy; between tests, they have tea in the hospital cafe, and discuss maybe giving up tea and eating better. That’d just be something for you to hit me with a stick about, Tom says with light mischief in his tone. The test results aren’t good, but they could be worse. On a scale of one to five, Joan is a three. Three is closer to five, she says, but Tom says that’s nonsense, because one is as close to three as three is to five. She needs a lumpectomy, then chemotherapy treatments, then they’ll talk about a double mastectomy. He’ll be there with her for every moment, he says. “Every moment,” he says.

They sit down, worried. Joan says she wants to say something strange, and Tom replies that he won’t think it’s strange. “I’m glad our Debbie isn’t here to go through this,” she says. On the day of her first surgery, she’s worried they’ll be late. Tom had to feed the fish. “Flush it,” she says. “I’ll flush you,” he says, prickly, playful, defensive. Coincidentally, it’s their daughter’s birthday. Joan insists that Tom can drop her off at the hospital and have plenty of time to visit Debbie’s grave before the surgery is over. He reluctantly agrees. She insists he not tell Debbie that she has cancer, and he reluctantly agrees to that, too. He unburdens himself to the headstone though, speaking about Joan’s cancer, saying how she didn’t want him to mention it, even saying how strange he feels speaking to a grave.

Joan’s surgery went pretty well. Lump, bigger than expected, but, gone. Some lymph nodes, gone. She stays the night. He goes home, finds the fish, dead. He scoops it out with his hand. Flushes it. Cries. He goes to the pet store. Has to replace the fish so the wife won’t notice, he says. Does she love the fish, asks the clerk. Hates it, he says. He picks her up. The doctor says Joan is cancer-free. Why does she need chemo then, Tom asks. To remove any cancer cells that may still be in her body. Then she’s not cancer-free, he argues. You’re embarrassing, Joan says. There’s more to this movie, but I can’t just give it away. You should watch it for yourself.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Manville we recall for being stunning in performance in Phantom Thread, and this is similarly rich. This is Neeson at his Kinsey powers, not the Taken action gruffster of recent days. The film itself is a cancer/disease plot similar to, I dunno, The Fault in Our Stars, The Farewell, Funny People, 50/50 maybe, and Still Alice, except that’s Alzheimer’s, not cancer.

Performance Worth Watching: Neeson and Manville are two leather chairs that have been in the den for decades, and the world would not be right if they were ever separated.

Memorable Dialogue: “How’s Tom?” asks Joan’s doctor.

“The same,” she replies. “He’s Tom all the time.”

Sex and Skin: Yes, Tom and Joan still have sex. They’re very much in love. We see a little of it, but not much. Also, this being a European movie and not an American movie, we actually see the breasts that need operating on.

Our Take: What wonderfully modulated, lived-in performances these are. There’s enough joy in Joan and Tom’s life together to make us wonder if maybe they were married later in life, but no — they’ve been together since the Big Bang, more or less, and I pieced together what happened: They got married around age 30 maybe, had a daughter who was lovely and bright, and after she died, they grieved, fought through it, surely fought with each other, so intense it was, but eventually fought their way back to a deep, loving place where they can be reasonably happy and even speak openly about Debbie without gouging open great wounds again.

None of this is detailed in the script, but I sensed it in Neeson and Manville’s inflections and inferences. In the hospital, they see Peter (David Wilmot), Debbie’s former teacher. He was arrogant, they recall, but if he’s in the oncology ward, then they should say hello, Joan says. He heard about Debbie, and he says he’s sorry. His cancer is terminal; his partner, Steve (Amit Shah), can’t deal with it, so he stays in the cafe. Peter and Joan speak regularly. Tom spends time by Joan’s side, and also in the cafe, where he sees Steve from across the room. When he finally approaches Steve, they speak, because they need to speak to each other, we feel. Back in Tom and Joan’s house, the camera moves slowly through empty rooms like a ghost.

Apologies for falling back into description, but Ordinary Love is so fascinating in its nuance, it has no reason to be more than a story of life and death, eschewing the phony histrionics of 10-hankie weepers. I’ve said a lot about it; there’s so much more to be said about it. So much more. It doesn’t meander without definition, though. There’s an arc, but a small one, because our lives tend to be collections of arcs, and we’ll never get to look at the overall arc of ourselves unless there’s an afterlife. So we’ll consider this arc that Tom and Joan find themselves in, and see their great flaws and assets as humans, and wish them only the best. This isn’t an extraordinary story (but you knew that; read the title) but the relationship here is absolutely extraordinary.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Lesley Manville. We are here for her.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Ordinary Love on Hulu