Culture Cabinet

The premise of writer-director Uberto Pasolini’s new film, Nowhere Special, is quite simple: a single parent with a terminal illness works to find a new home for his child after his death. But the emotional journey the audience goes on while watching it is anything but simple.

John (James Norton) is a window washer in a small Irish town, raising his four-year-old son Michael (Daniel Lamont) to the best of his abilities. Despite not being well off, he’s built a solid life for his kid: he plays with him, arranges playdates with other parents from his school, and reads him books at bedtime.

The film’s quiet, slow beginning lulls the audience into a state of security, giving a glimpse of what appears to be a very stable life shared by John and his adorable son. However, cracks quickly appear. Michael continues to ask where his mother has gone, but we also begin to see John interviewing sets of parents as he seeks someone to adopt his son.

John has a terminal illness and has been faced with the impossible task of choosing a new family for his child. He interviews a variety of families, from a wealthy couple who would buy Michael a puppy but send him to boarding school, to a couple who are clearly still not over the idea that they can’t have their own biological children. John isn’t satisfied that any of them are the right fit for Michael, but how could anyone else ever be?

Even as John is dismayed at some of the choices he’s been given by the adoption agency, he’s also determined that this will end up giving Michael a better shot at life than he could. We don’t learn much of John’s background, but we don’t really need to. When he tells one family, “He deserves a normal family, all of the chances I never had,” it says more than enough.

The deep sadness of the film sneaks up on you: witnessing John’s increasing exhaustion as he gets sicker, Michael saying, “I like home” when John asks if he’d like to live somewhere else, John’s insistence that he doesn’t need to leave Michael anything to remember him by. But Pasolini is careful in his script and his direction to never let it devolve into over-sentimentality that would take away from the gripping authenticity of the story.

Nowhere Special also serves as a window into some of the reasons that children are put up for adoption and why families choose to adopt a child. Pasolini includes enough interviews with families to demonstrate the variety of situations that lead a family to adoption, without it becoming repetitive.

Lamont and Norton have excellent chemistry, with their bond being fully believable. It’s clear how comfortable Lamont is with Norton, which makes their interactions even more heartbreaking. Norton transforms in this role, not just because of the Northern Irish accent and the tattoos, but also because of the way that he physically shows the emotional weight that John is carrying. He perfectly portrays both the warm affection that John has for his son and the despair at trying to figure out how to explain death to a young child.

The film is only 90 minutes long, but it’s more than enough time to make the audience feel for the doomed father and son pair. What’s perhaps most gutwrenching is how normal their lives are, the little moments that we’re allowed to experience, while knowing what’s coming.

Nowhere Special is a beautiful testament to the love between a father and son, the lengths that a parent will go to for their child even while suffering themselves, and the difficulty of facing impending loss. Pasolini writes and directs with a restrained hand that keeps it from falling into melodrama, while Norton’s performance is a perfect centerpiece for the story.