In short: My Talks With Dean Spanley (2008)

Before I encountered this film from New Zealand directed by Toa Fraser, I didn’t even know there were any movie adaptations of the works of Lord Dunsany. It’s not the Pegana movie I secretly dream of, but it’s certainly a fine – and strange – little film. It’s taking place in a lovingly – and knowingly – reconstructed Edwardian Age. Fisk Junior (Jeremy Northam) a man of what was probably called great melancholy in his time, is haunted by the unspoken grief about a brother who died in the Boer War and the difficult relationship to his father, the elderly Fisk Senior (Peter O’Toole), whom he meets once a week, but with whom he doesn’t ever discuss anything of actual import to their emotional lives.

While on what goes for a spiritual quest when you are an Edwardian gentleman (that is, listening to the mindnumbingly boring lecture of a swami about reincarnation), Fisk Minor encounters the dean Spanley (Sam Neill). The dean has the somewhat peculiar habit of entering a kind of fugue state whenever he drinks Tokay, vividly remembering his past life as a dog; in roundabout ways, Fisk Minor’s fascination with this aspect of the man, and his obsession with getting the poor cleric drunk on Tokay to hear more about his life as a dog, will bring father and son Fisk together.

And really, if that description does sound intriguing rather than plain stupid to you, you’ll probably, like me, enjoy the film’s peculiar sense of irony, as well as its reconstruction of an Edwardian state of mind, and share in the special and unexpected joy of watching Sam Neill – in the most Edwardian language possible thanks to Alan Sharp’s tonally perfect script – reminisce about his time as a dog.


It’s really a lovely film, perhaps a bit too mushy and nice to its characters in the ending stretch - or I’m perhaps simply not quite as optimistic when it comes to radical change in people as the film is. It is full of lovely (that’s really the perfect word to describe this), sometimes wickedly funny, detail fitting to its time, and featuring a bunch of actors (Bryan Browne and Judy Parfitt are in there, too) doing justice to what really is a pretty damn peculiar project. That the film isn’t ever turning its plot wild and wacky is another of its virtues – this is one of those endeavours that take a preposterous thing, realize that one of the great things in the movies is to turn a preposterous thing into something tangible and real, and use it with dignity and love.