The unlikely elderly pastime is belting out covers of rock and pop tunes, and nothing makes the ailing Redgrave happier than singing with a local choir of fellow senior-citizen crooners. Even after she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, Redgrave won't give the pipes a rest—despite the stern disapproval of her husband, a grump whose stone-faced seriousness the movie only sometimes plays for laughs. It’s a given that Stamp will eventually soften through song, his defenses worn down by Gemma Arterton’s relentlessly cheerful music teacher. But on the way to that inevitable redemption, Unfinished Song allows for a few rocky detours; there’s nothing jokey, for example, about the old man’s strained relationship with his grown son (Christopher Eccleston), or his inability, even in his final days with Redgrave, to say what he really feels.
As an actor, Stamp hasn’t a sentimental bone in his body, which helps. When he bellows that it’s too late for him to change, the whole film seems to buckle, however briefly, under the full weight of his regret. It’s a rich performance—so rich, in fact, that the movie around it only looks flimsier by comparison. For all its sporadic flashes of insight, Unfinished Song is built around the assumption that there’s nothing funnier than old timers throwing devil horns, doing the robot, or performing a rousing rendition of Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let's Talk About Sex.” While the documentary Young@Heart celebrated the spirit of real geriatric choirs, Unfinished Song turns their efforts into fodder for both kitschy comedy and triumph-of-the-underdogs cliché. Stamp, who’s initially concerned that audiences will simply laugh at his wife and her songbird companions, eventually swallows his pride and gets in on the action. Maybe he had it right the first time.
