netwallah Review of Delivering Milo

Delivering Milo (2001)

Better than it might have been

[8/10 · 29 November 2006]

Sometimes the number of possible plot variations seems almost unlimited, and sometimes the plot-hoard seems constrained and restricted to a finite number of basic stories and a set of permutations. When it comes to this movie, however, I'm not sure whether I believe in the big set or the little set. It's half-way between. In some ways the premise is familiar—there's a heaven, of sorts, where children hang out waiting for the appropriate time to be born. It's sort of like a big residential school, all the children wearing neat school uniforms, tended by young people in their late teens or early 20s, in a space that's half neo-classical and half office building and all suffused with golden light. One of the children is Milo (Anton Yelchin), a curly-headed kid adept at card tricks and telling fortunes. He likes it there—wherever "there" is—and so when "Mr. Gordon" pronounces him Ready To Go, he's reluctant. The kids sit calmly in a big room, scooting over in line as each of their friends walks through the Door into the bright light and takes the mother's hand and gets born. A nice, whimsical conceit, that manages to be matter-of-fact and sentimental at the same time. But Milo is apprehensive and refuses to go. This means the next kid can't get born, and the team in the golden-light place are worried. Meanwhile, in New York there's a couple waiting for their first child to be born, Elizabeth (Bridget Fonda) and Kevin (Campbell Scott). They're an interesting pair—he is quiet and handsome and involved in some sort of wildly successful artistic production that involves glass-blowing and a gigantic Manhattan warehouse-studio and a large jovial assistant, and he is kind and sympathetic most of the time and loves Elizabeth and even rides a motorcycle in his spare time. The problem is Elizabeth, who is successful at whatever she does, and is well-dressed and quite lovely, and happy with Kevin, but she has doubts and self-doubts stemming from the fact that her father walked out on her and her mother when she was little. She wants the baby, but she's afraid. And just at the time Milo is waiting in the Door chamber, she's going into labour, and then when he runs out, it stops. And so do all other births everywhere in the world. The attendants, in conference, get a telephone call from Upstairs—a little piece of business: the phones are the chunky old rotary ones, but there are no cords. Somebody is going to take Milo to the world for a day to induce him to agree to getting born. It turns out to be Elmore Dahl (Albert Finney), a crusty, jovial, card-playing, con artist, who wasn't bad enough to go Downstairs but certainly wasn't good enough to go Upstairs. He insists on a deal, that if he succeeds, he gets some more time alive, and "He" agrees. Elmore and Milo take an elevator down to an intake unit, sort of a hotel lobby, also illuminated by the golden light, and out they go onto the streets of New York. What follows is predictable: Elmore takes Milo to his favourite places, the Carnegie Deli, Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, and buys him ice cream and other good foods. Milo is amused, but then he's terrified by a Bosch painting in the Met, and even when they get to Atlantic City—Elmore has gotten himself attached to lush, laughing, eager divorcée Anna (Leslie Ann Warren)—Milo is reluctant. And he's disturbed to learn that Elmore abandoned his family, and he can't miss the signs of selfishness in Elmore's sometimes grotesque jollity. So everything is about to fail--everything--the Door will close, no more babies will ever be born. Elmore gives up and tries to go to bed with Anna. Milo wanders on the boardwalk and runs into a weeping Elizabeth, who's been reminded of her absent father, enjoyed a freakish run of good blackjack luck at home with a pack of Atlantic City cards, and then lost at the blackjack table. Milo is drawn to her and tries to cheer her up, using the same techniques Elmore used on him, and it works. Telling her fortune with a deck of cards, Milo realizes who she is—his mother—and has a change of heart, and at the same time so does Elmore. They almost don't make it back; Milo collapses outside the intake door as Elizabeth goes into labour again and Kevin shows up on his motorcycle to take care of her, and Elmore—his grandfather—has to choose to carry him back, thus ending his brief reincarnation. He grimaces as he does so, noting it's a case of the scammer scammed. Mr. Gordon says "He works in mysterious ways." Milo is born, and suddenly births happen again. Elmore is discharged—upstairs. In some ways the plot line is so predictable that one gets the feeling of déja vu, and yet it's done so cleverly, with a nice touch of dry humour in heaven, and with a gigantic performance by Finney, whose New York accent is pretty good, and who is both lovable and outrageous, and with solid performances by Fonda and Yelchin (the very gifted Campbell Scott is underused here)—with all this working in its favour, the movie is surprisingly good in spite of its potential shortcomings.