For a man who’s meant to be ailing, English actor Timothy Spall is having a very busy 2022.
Photo: Screenshot
He popped up in Spencer as a toff, in It Snows in Benidorm as an unlikely romantic lead, and now he’s put on thirty years or so to play 90-year-old Tom on an allegoric journey via public transport.
It’s called The Last Bus.
The journey is between the best-known geographical points in Britain, though I’m not sure if anyone’s ever had the cheek to do it in a movie before.
Old Tom has lived most of his life in John O’Groats at the northern tip of Scotland. But he was originally from Land’s End in south-west Cornwall, where he met and married the love of his life Mary.
When Mary died, she and Tom were already planning this trip, we’re told. And it’s devised to take advantage of another mythic British emblem – that proof of being a pensioner, the bus pass.
We follow Tom as he hops from one short-trip local bus to another. In fact, part of the appeal of The Last Bus is spotting the wide range of buses – white, blue, green and black, teal, a red double-decker.
And along the way he strikes up acquaintance with lots of fellow travellers.
It looks as if we’re following Tom’s itinerary through the UK, but in fact the whole film – directed by veteran Scottish film-maker Gillies McKinnon – was shot, for budgetary reasons, entirely in Scotland. Goodness knows where they got all the buses from!
And apart from one or two longer scenes, the bulk of the film is watching Timothy Spall doing not much on various buses.
So much of the story has to be internal - old Tom’s memories of him and Mary courting, their early days in Cornwall, and the later years, with Downton Abbey’s Phyllis Logan given not enough to do as the wife with the secret sorrow.
There are a few pleasant scenes along the way - Tom missing his stop near a B & B, and being found adrift in the middle of the night, and later being adopted by happy football fans, or a late-night hen party.
But they underline the fact that Tom’s just a ship passing in the night, so to speak, and there’s no way that any of these scenes can actually build to anything much.
All right, we see Tom’s bus-mates regularly filming him on their smart-phones, particularly when he stands up to a racist bully, picking on a Muslim mother and child.
When it’s over, that’s it, surely. However, in the alternative reality of The Last Bus, old Tom becomes an online celebrity – hashtag “old guy in bus” sort of thing.
Just as well it turns out a Scottish bus pass is illegal south of Hadrian’s Wall.
In the end it’s hardly a shock to the system when Old Tom conquers various obstacles to reach Land’s End.
But the audience for The Last Bus is unlikely to complain about a predictable hanky-dabbing conclusion. Frankly, many of them were just there for the buses anyway.
