A different perspective on kids growing up without parents. Willing Hurt plays a wannabe father who's still that kid deep down and Nathan Yapp plays a kid who's mature for his age but troubled inside. It's a slow paced, interesting story. Director Chris Menges portrays emotions perfectly with simplicity.
It's hard to imagine a film like this getting a cinema release in the 2010s, not least with a Hollywood actor. Small-scale & intimate, it's the kind of story we'd now see expanded to six episodes & shown on TV. Hurt is very good in the role of a painfully shy & inarticulate man, who in his efforts to adopt a child from a troubled background, finds a way of understanding the traumatic relationship with his own father.
Review of Second Best
