‘Nowhere Special’ Review: James Norton Brings Raw Feeling to Intimate Father-Son Drama

While James Norton’s significant feature work includes roles in Mr. Jones, Bob Marley: One Love and the Greta Gerwig Little Women remake, he remains best known outside his native England for playing the chief antagonist, Tommy Lee Royce, in three seasons of Happy Valley. That murderous character in the riveting Yorkshire crime series was utterly terrifying, worlds away from the tenderness and aching vulnerability of Norton’s moving performance in Nowhere Special. Uberto Pasolini’s intimate family drama trains a pleasingly unsentimental lens on a heart-wrenching scenario.

Since hitting it big as producer of The Full Monty, Pasolini’s forays into directing have been small-scale efforts that left a limited footprint. Like his 2013 character study, Still Life, this modest but accomplished third feature again deals with death and dignity. But it represents a step up in terms of its subtlety and controlled observational style.

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While Still Life at times strained for pathos, Nowhere Special achieves its poignancy through an understatement echoed in Andrew Simon McAllister’s gentle melodic score, dominated by guitars and orchestral strings, and the contemplative cinematography of Marius Panduru, known for his work with fellow Romanian Radu Jude.

Most of all, the movie’s defining restraint is embodied in the depth and nuance of Norton’s characterization as John, a 34-year-old blue-collar Belfast resident who works as a window-cleaner, but more importantly, a loving single father, anxiously facing the most momentous decision of his life.

That life, we learn early on, more by suggestion than explication, has a looming expiration date. Diagnosed with what appears to be late-stage cancer (his illness is never specified), John is working with an adoption agency to find a new home for Michael (Daniel Lamont), the adoring 4-year-old son whose entire world revolves around his dad. He’s also doing everything possible to shelter the boy from the reality of death, balancing deep sadness and a sense of hopelessness with the need to stay positive for his son.

Some adoption candidates seem almost ideal on the surface, yet they never feel quite right to John for reasons he seldom articulates to Shona (Eileen O’Higgins), the compassionate young agency trainee who accompanies him on interviews. Others are patently unsuitable, notably a persnickety couple who prompt one of John’s rare outbursts of frustration with the process. He sees people from across the class spectrum, each meet-and-greet a self-contained vignette. Even if Pasolini telegraphs John’s ultimate choice, robbing the film of some tension, that doesn’t lessen the final scene’s emotional effectiveness.

Panduru’s camera watches John at work and around the city, his eyes homing in on every glimpse of a happy child or a loving family unit. The motif of windows as a snapshot of other lives is never overplayed. The film also excels at capturing the comforting rhythms of John’s daily life with Michael — the walks to and from school, afternoons in the park, mealtimes, bedtime stories. It’s on these simple pleasures as much as the underlying sorrow that the film’s central relationship is built. All this could easily have turned saccharine without Pasolini’s lightness of touch and without such superb casting.

Norton skillfully conveys John’s efforts to maintain a façade of normalcy while his eyes reveal the interior struggle of his brooding thoughts on mortality, his diminishing strength and his son’s inevitable pain. At times, a barely concealed rage over the unfairness of his situation ripples just beneath the surface, an anger John works hard to contain, especially around Michael.

Lamont’s unaffected naturalness is just as crucial. He’s a remarkably instinctive actor with large, expressive eyes, and shots of Michael studying his dad, trying to get a read on what’s not being said, are extremely touching. Lamont and Norton’s easy body language with each other suggests a genuine connection formed during rehearsals.

Pasolini’s screenplay, inspired by a real-life adoption case, shows admirable economy in its disclosure of John’s backstory. We learn that Michael’s mother is Russian and that she exited abruptly to return home six months after the boy was born, leaving no contact information.

We also surmise from John’s tattoos and his world-weary gaze during solitary moments that his unhappy childhood segued into a wilder youth, before becoming a full-time single parent reined him in. He’s an uneducated man whose experience of fatherhood has given him sensitivity; he clearly considers Michael the best thing to come out of his life.

Norton, whose name has been popping up in U.K. clickbait headlines about the potential next James Bond, convincingly roughs up his chiseled good looks, projecting a gaunt, hangdog appearance when he’s not putting up a front for Michael.

The actor beautifully calibrates the gradual shift in John as the window to make a decision starts closing. At first he’s stubborn, determined to find the perfect family and unwilling to settle for less. He’s also dismissive of the adoption agency’s counseling to make a “memory box” of objects that might help Michael know something about his late father when he’s older, or to read him the recommended children’s book, When Dinosaurs Die, to familiarize his son with the concept of death.

But little by little, he inches toward the realization that he can never have more than superficial impressions of prospective families from their limited encounters. And he comes to accept that Michael needs to have at least some idea of what’s going on, as much for John’s own unburdening as for his son’s understanding. It’s to Pasolini’s credit that he never milks these scenes for tears. Every emotion in the drama is earned, without manipulation. The arc of the film is John’s gradual acceptance of the fact that there are no certainties. He just has to trust his instincts — and those of Michael.

Without ever straying too far from John’s fundamental nature as a somewhat taciturn character, there are lovely scenes in which he shares his doubts with Shona or listens as a kind elderly widow (Stella McCusker) for whom he does odd jobs speaks about her late husband, revealing that she still talks to him every day.

Ultimately, what keeps Nowhere Special from being nothing special is the film’s delicacy, its unfussy simplicity, its perceptiveness. The empathy it brings to one man’s crushing decision makes this an affecting portrait of parental devotion.