Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Michael Sheen, Cary Elwes, Nathalie Emmanuel, Sophie Simnett, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Robin Askwith, Anna Lundberg, John Thomson, Natalie Mitson, Laura Evelyn, Sianad Gregory, Thomas Law, Claire Cage, Anna Bolton, Edward Harrison, Samuel Logan, Harry Giubileo, George Hannigan, Dan Bothers, Danny Ashbrook, Matthew Lee, Philippa Cole, Jack Cristou, Ebony Aboagye, Charlotte-Hannah Jones, Volenté Lloyd, Coein Dalton, Lily Adair, Tom Hayes, Samuel Blake, Emily Adair.
If Christmas is the time for making amends, for contrition, for forgiveness, then art, especially that created for cinema or television, is perhaps the great enabler, the promoter of the feeling of regret, of grief that our words may have hurt another and remembered with distress during the emotional pull of crackers and the repeats of festive shopping.
It could be argued as easy, as straight forward as placing a coin in a Christmas pudding, for nothing pulls on the heart strings than the right setting, dark days and possible loneliness than the ability to feel regret and possible redemption, if Charles Dickens could highlight this ghosts of all that was and is to come to the point where it becomes a sensational hit, then cinema only has to follow the same tried and tested rules for us to reach out and see the time of year as one of hope and liberation.
The pulse of humanity does not though work in the same way, and it takes a decently laid plot to really get underneath the skin of age and the damage done.
Julian Kemp’s Last Train To Christmas faces no detours, no derailments, it embraces all that is required of film for the period, and with the ever brilliant Michael Sheen being joined in the narrative by the enigmatic Carey Elwes, Robin Askwith, Hayley Mills, and Sophie Simnett, it has a grace to it that sits with the mind in the contemplative salvation it seeks, as well as finding several moments in which the whimsey and dreamlike quality strived for gladden the heart; and yet it also carries the unfortunate flavour that so many films have come to entail in recent years, that of trying to find the quaint reminisce that came with films such as Muppets’ Christmas Carol, it asks us to connect with something that we do not arguably have the capacity to attain anymore, the belief that we can change the future with a simple act.
It is not because we have become too cynical, it is because the act of redemption is not recognised by a world that wants to continually punish, socially, publicly, the thought of what they perceive to be the transgressor.
Still, Last Train To Christmas is imaginative, it is heartfelt, and it is a film that understands its remit at the time of year, poignant and with a soul, just not enough to be anything more though than crowded first class sentimentality and nostalgia.
Ian D. Hall