Loving Walter
February 2004 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Seeing Sir Ian McKellen in all his cinematic glory as the wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, one might assume he had been on the silver screen since birth. But that is not so. McKellen was a noted stage actor who only came to the world of movies and television in the early 1980s. Loving Walter was his second movie, and the second major feature for noted director Stephen Frears, coming one year after his success with My Beautiful Laundrette. At the other end of things, it was the last film for Sarah Miles before going into a self-imposed retirement that would end a decade later.

Frears produced Loving Walter (or Walter, as it was simply called in England) for television, but its production and casting values are worthy of any medium. The script, based on novels by David Cook, tells the story of Walter, a mentally handicapped young man who loses both his parents in a short period. He keeps his mom’s death a secret from the neighbors, letting her body decay in bed, until someone finds out. Walter is then put into a psychiatric hospital. As dim as he might be, Walter is far better off than most of the hopeless cases in the facility and begins to make points by helping those less fortunate than himself.

Eventually he meets June (Miles), a young woman who shows him love and compassion. They escape and return to the real world where they find that people who are mentally handicapped face the virtually impossible task of living without assistance.

McKellen’s performance is a real tour de force. His face might be puffed out, sometimes drooling, but his eyes betray the gentle soul inside the Halloween mask. One never thinks of the great actor playing Walter. His portrayal is so complete that he is Walter. The fine supporting cast, which is actually mixed actors and real patients, is superb, and Miles is outstanding as the nymphomaniac June. Director Frears moves everyone well; the pacing is close to perfect. The film is unstinting in its representation of the average mental institution. The scenes within its walls are compelling, yet uncomfortable to view.

The DVD is transferred well. The video is clean and detailed, just short of current high standards. All the tics in the mental patients’ faces are easy to discern, as are set design, outside and inside. The sound is quite respectable mono of the period, doing justice to both dialogue and George Fenton’s emotionally wrought music score.

The extras are skimpy but what’s there is very good. There are separate present-day interviews with McKellen, Frears, and Cook, in which each remembers the circumstances surrounding Walter’s production. There are bios and filmographies for the major principals. And there is a frame-by-frame history of mental disease and its treatment that will make the viewer very happy that we don’t live in times past, when mentally ill persons were treated with extreme cruelty. This is a good DVD for lovers of fine drama, and it lets us see that McKellen was a dramatic magician long before he became a wizard.

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