This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

This wasn't a successful movie at all. A love story aimed at an older audience, the kind of movie watchers preferring exposition to explosions. It can be defined a quality World War II drama that deserves to be more just another TV broadcast. The promise is the kind that might seem overly melodramatic if heard in a movie set in contemporary times but it is at home with the wartime realities so effectively rendered in Closing the Ring. Attenborough is a past master at this type of drama and shifts a lot between the decades, avoiding the confusion so common to non-linear films like this. The resemblance between the younger and older actors isn't striking, but their performances make this a minor issue.

Closing the Ring opens in a small Michigan town in 1991 with the funeral of a World War II veteran. The dearly departed man's daughter delivers a poignant eulogy to a church full of veterans. It is obvious that this man was rather beloved. But curiously the wife of the deceased seems not at all interested in the proceedings. She's not even in the church, rather sitting outside smoking a cigarette. When offered condolences she acknowledges that her husband was a good man. But she says she won't miss him. She appears to be not the slightest bit bereaved, content to sit there and wait for them to wheel her dead husband out. Obviously there is something going on here that we're not aware of. And we spend the rest of the film jumping back and forth across fifty years of time and across an ocean as long-buried secrets are revealed and everything becomes clear.The newly widowed woman we meet in the opening scene is Ethel Ann. And after the funeral we are transported back to a much happier time. It's 1941 and young Ethel Ann is in love with a young farmer named Teddy. Complicating matters is the fact that Teddy's not the only one who loves the beautiful, vibrant Ethel Ann. His two close friends Jack and Chuck have a thing for her as well. But she's Teddy's girl. Everybody knows that, everybody accepts that. So Teddy and Ethel Ann should be destined to live happily ever after. But Teddy, Jack and Chuck will soon be going off to war. And lives will be changed. We begin to understand how the young Ethel Ann, so full of life, could become the old Ethel Ann, utterly defeated by life, whom we saw in the film's beginning.The story constantly jumps back and forth in time from the 1940s to 1991. And it also jumps back and forth between Michigan and Northern Ireland. It is in Belfast in 1991, set against the backdrop of the IRA blowing things up, where the second key strand of the plot unfolds. An old man named Quinlan and a naive young teen named Jimmy dig up the wreckage of a B-17 which crashed there decades ago during the war. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the Teddy/Ethel Ann story and the Quinlan/Jimmy story are somehow intertwined. With all the skipping around in time and place the movie does have a bit of a challenge sustaining its momentum. It's a movie of fits and starts. But ultimately it works.The movie is helped by a generally excellent cast. Shirley MacLaine, playing the older version of Ethel Ann, and Christopher Plummer, portraying the one character who knows Ethel Ann's secrets, are nominally the leads and they're quite good in their roles. But it's really more of an ensemble piece. Mischa Barton as the young Ethel Ann makes a very good impression. Neve Campbell as Ethel Ann's daughter and Pete Postlethwaite as old Quinlan are good as well. And Martin McCann captures Jimmy's wide-eyed naiveté perfectly. Stephen Amell seems a little forced and unnatural in playing the young Teddy but that's the only minor quibble with the cast.The story is a good one, very sentimental and told in a unique way. You get the sense the movie would benefit from a second viewing. Once you have all the times and places sorted out in your head you could probably appreciate the story even more. As it is, on a first run through, the story is a little confusing at times. There's a lot going on, at times maybe a little bit too much. Did we really need the IRA storyline for example? In the end I guess that plot point serves its purpose in helping the story to get itself to the finish line. But along the way it slows things down and adds another layer of confusion to the mix. In the end though all's well that ends well. Everything does finally come together well enough to make this an ultimately satisfying movie, an overlooked little gem.

I enjoyed this movie, but more towards the end. It seems like the beginning was just thrown together so quickly, the love story progressed so fast that for me I didn't believe they were in love or ever in love, but later in the movie you see the love stronger than for me it was in the beginning. It's sort of like okay you see us two or three times, now you are supposed to believe we are in love, and oh yes, and now let's get married and have babies?! I just didn't buy it.Other than that, the movie is really entertaining and sad at the same time. Just a few of the characters and their stories just for me were not fully put on the table, and issues not resolved, etc...

For the life of me, I cannot figure how this got in my queue. I almost sent it back without watching, but there must have been a reason I put it there.Yes, Sir Richard Attenborough has made a lot of good films (Ghandi, Cry Freedom, Chaplain). Maybe this will be one of them. There are a lot of good actors here: Christopher Plummer, Neve Campbell, and Pete Postlethwaite, to name a few.Maybe it was to see Mischa Barton ("The O.C."), who played Shirley MacLaine's character as a young girl. We got a nice view when she was getting it on with Teddy (Stephen Amell). We get a full view later on when he is leaving for gunnery school.The story takes place in the present, when Ethel Ann (Shirley MacLaine) has just buried Chuck (David Alpay), and 50 years prior at the dawn of WWII, when Chucck and Teddy (Stephen Amell) were heading off to war.A young boy (Martin McCann) has just found a rind belonging to Teddy and Ethel Ann at a B-17 crash site that Quinlan (Pete Postlethwaite) has been digging up. He has to get away from the IRA, so he brings it to America.Ethel Ann goes back with him to Belfast and finds love for the first time in 50 years.It was an excellent story. I was surprised, thinking it would be a Lifetime special, but the actors in it made it special.