Reviewed by PETER CALDER
Herald rating * * *
Billy Elliot on a cricket pitch with the added frisson of an illicit liaison, this soft-hearted coming-of-age story is perfectly inoffensive but never more than mildly inspiring.
Its central figure is David Wiseman (Smith), the 11-year-old son of Jewish immigrants in London in the 1960s, whose passion for cricket is matched only by his inability to bat, bowl and field.
When a West Indian family moves in next door, the racist neighbourhood is scandalised, but all David sees is the titanic cricket net the newcomers erect.
Before long the Jamaican paterfamilias Dennis Samuels (Hollywood regular Lindo is actually English-born) and his cricket-mad daughter are instilling in David the fundamentals of the game. Parallel plotlines have David's irritatingly fragile mother, Ruth (Woof), getting all hot and bothered about Dennis; and the neighbours, who had just learned to cope with Jews, getting all hot and bothered about the terrace row's wrongly coloured new residents.
The arc of the story is predictable, though it's cleverly constructed to bring David to a crisis when he thinks he must choose between old and new friends, and Morrison directs competently enough. But Dennis is one of the more egregiously implausible characters in recent memory: the family is depicted as hard-up, but he never seems to work and can afford not one, but two, high-quality cricket nets (retail value about $1000 each).
The film's prospects are also, perhaps unfairly, hampered by an abysmal title which makes sense only after you've seen it and only if you were once an egghead, prep-school twerp.
The sexually charged scenes between Dennis and Ruth have a real conviction about them, and the production design is impressively moody, but there's little to set this apart from the crop of against-the-odds dramas that Brits specialise in these days.
CAST: Delroy Lindo, Sam Smith, Emily Woof
DIRECTOR: Paul Morrison
RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes
RATING: PG (adult themes)
SCREENING: Rialto
Wondrous Oblivion
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