Finding Your Feet ** (2017, Timothy Spall, Imelda Staunton, Celia Imrie, Joanna Lumley, David Hayman, John Sessions, Josie Lawrence) – Movie Review

Finding Your Feet is a guaranteed crowd pleaser with two bona fide national treasures in Imelda Staunton and Timothy Spall, plus a great performance by Celia Imrie.

Director Richard Loncraine’s often funny and charming Finding Your Feet is a guaranteed crowd pleaser on the theme of a second turn round the dance floor, with two bona fide national treasures in Imelda Staunton and Timothy Spall, plus a great performance by Celia Imrie.

Staunton plays Sandra, an up-tight, judgmental English middle-class snob who, on the eve of retirement, discovers her bossy husband (John Sessions) has been having an affair with her best friend Pamela (Josie Lawrence). Sandra is at her wit’s end and is forced to leave the husband, quit the family home, and try re-connect with her bohemian sister Bif (Imrie), who lives on a London inner-city council estate. Chalk meets cheese, so can they survive the close encounters and maybe even prosper?

[Spoiler alert] Bif finally persuades Sandra into joining a dance group, where she meets Charlie (Spall), who, unbeknownst to her, has a wife tucked away in a care home, suffering from dementia. The dance group enter a competition and head off for Rome to compete (cue nice Italian holiday for the cast), but while Sandra is finding her feet, Bif is on her last legs.

The downside of Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft’s sometimes glib and creaky screenplay is using dementia and cancer as plot devices, but this heart-warming, life-affirming movie means so well it is easy to forgive this. Staunton, Spall and Imrie provide huge measures of entertainment, especially Imrie in a knockout turn of substance, size and importance rare in her career.

National treasure Celia Imrie plays Bif in Finding Your Feet.

Finding Your Feet won’t win any awards for subtlety or originality, but it might for good fun, and certainly the admirable Imrie mustn’t be left out at next year’s awards voting. She is hereby promoted to national treasure herself.

Incidentally, the film has another bona fide national treasure – Joanna Lumley – in the cast, but, as so often recently, no one seems to be able to give her enough to do, or anything interesting to do. This is a shame and a waste. Like David Hayman and Josie Lawrence, Lumley is stranded on screen without any particular purpose or lines to speak of. As there are so few main characters, Leonard and Moorcroft could have sorted this out, surely?  But I must mention how good John Sessions is as the horrid husband Mike. It is a difficult, ungrateful role, and he pulls it off nicely.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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