Both excellent as strangers whose relationship begins the day they’re both diagnosed with the disease, the stars give necessary ballast to John Madden’s soft-centered film.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
@guylodge See All
BBC/Jonathan Birch There’s nothing fun about Parkinson’s disease, and no film about it can engineer an uncompromised happy ending. But John Madden’s “Onwards and Sideways” finds more uplift than one might expect in a story of two people, both living with Parkinson’s, exploring the possibilities of living with it together. It’s generally sunny and soft in outlook, though not blind to the disease’s debilitating effects on the body and mind — thanks to the firsthand insight of veteran TV comedy writer and Parkinson’s activist Paul Mayhew-Archer (“The Vicar of Dibley”), bringing his personal experience of the disease to his first feature screenplay. Even when the film strays into anodyne territory, it’s given genuine feeling and integrity by stars Laura Linney and Rhys Ifans, both superb as strangers in rural England who are initially blindsided, and gradually drawn together, by their shared diagnosis.
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