"Is Anybody There?" The answer is yes, thanks to fine acting

What happens when a tough director collides with a potentially mawkish script?

The result can be a mishmash, but as John Crowley's "Is Anybody There?" demonstrates, it can also be intriguingly uneven. Especially when the director happens to have such skilled performers as Michael Caine and Bill Milner on his side.

Together, these three raise Peter Harness' familiar script to the level of something that's more than merely watchable. Despite all the rough edges and predictable touches, the film becomes quite moving in its final act.

The 76-year-old Caine, who has experienced a late-career streak of strong roles ("Children of Men," "The Quiet American," his Oscar-winning turn in "The Cider House Rules"), is at his most resourceful playing The Amazing Clarence, a widowed magician who sees only suicide as an option when he turns up at a British nursing home in the late 1980s.

Milner, the child star of "Son of Rambow," plays Edward, the almost equally despondent 10-year-old boy whose parents (David Morrissey, Anne-Marie Duff) run the place. When the death-obsessed Edward realizes just how desperately gloomy Clarence has become, he opens up a bit (Milner is a great listener) and they begin to bond.

You don't have to have seen dozens of Hallmark movies to guess where Harness' narrative is headed. But the writer deserves some credit for creating a seaside retirement home that's full of eccentrics, enthusiastically played by such British pros as Rosemary Harris and Sylvia Syms.

Most of these people realize they're not going anywhere (the movie's title expresses their hope for communication with the already dead), and that includes Edward's wayward father. Morrissey plays him as a middle-age hippie who feels trapped and succumbs to his lust for a careless teenager.

Crowley is best-known for directing last year's grimly uncompromising portrait of a child murderer, "Boy A," which couldn't have been less like the sometimes sentimental "Is Anybody There?"

But there's nothing fake about Clarence and Edward's relationship, or the lonely depths that Caine and Milner find in them.

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com