Endgame (2000)

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Connor McPherson makes a masterful film about four people at the end of the world dealing with their lives. Two are reduced to legless existence in garbage cans, on is blind and immobile sitting in the center of a great empty room, and one is unable to sit down and is in constant motion waiting for his next task. Its a darkly bleak film that transcends it's limiting stage origins thanks to being more than just a camera filming a play. To be certain the film never leaves the room that is where it all takes place but at the same time you never really notice since it moves around the room changing perspective, and focus to make a film that is very much a living breathing thing. I'm very impressed with McPherson as a filmmaker since he'd done something that very few people who've tried to film a Samuel Beckett play has done, namely make it work on film on its own terms. Its a masterpiece. (I would also be remiss if I didn't mention Michael Gambon and David Thewlis as Clov and Hamm who manage to make acting look easy.)

I just want to add that all four members of the cast are brilliant here, and Thewlis & Gambon play off each other beautifully. Gambon catches the right note of ham (pun intended), and Thewlis finds his small spaces between, as his part requires.Although I would've liked to have seen the two windows facing back, more as two eyes, I can accept Conor McPherson's choices. Perhaps the space could've been a bit more confined, placing the trashcans closer to Hamm, but that, too, is personal taste.Certainly the steps down to the kitchen were genius, making Clov hobble up them torturously, and re-inforcing how dependent Hamm is on Clov.

One of the best from the series The Complete Beckett. Gambon is dreadful and brilliant. I found myself utterly riveted. As the TV ads here said when the full series was shown recently, many will find Beckett pointless. A fortunate few will find him brilliant. Thank heavens this series was made.

'Endgame' is often considered Beckett's masterpiece, arguably the greatest play of the 20th century. The musicality, companionship and lightness underpinning 'Waiting for Godot''s despair is replaced by claustrophobia; just as Vladimir and Estragon, kept alive by hope, are taken over by Hamm and Clov, bitter, maimed master and servant, waiting not for Godot, just the end.The play's apocalyptic comedy, complete with parents kept in dustbins, is a chessgame about death; mental disintegration in a meaningless universe; an allegory for the theatre. There are never any escapes in Beckett's hells, just the knowledge that the grim winding down of a life will be deferred for tomorrow night's performance.For me, the play is also an hilarious parody of the Anglo-Irish Big House story, with Hamm the cruel landlord, withering solitary as the Famine lashes outside, littered with the corpses he refused to help, always witholding that saving kind word, as we all do.Director MacPherson is himself an acclaimed playwright, and surely sensitive to Beckett as theatre, not just the words which enthrall other filmmakers of his work. He shoots his film in the obtrusively unobtrusive style of a BBC schools educational video, with minimal cinematic flourish.