Closing the Ring

Closing the Ring (2007) is Richard Attenborough's wartime melodrama, available to watch online on iFILM. Two timelines, one engagement ring and a secret an old woman has kept for fifty years — buried so deep she's hidden it from herself.

It's 1991 in Michigan, where Ethel Ann, played by Shirley MacLaine, buries her husband and stays cold and unreachable. Meanwhile in Belfast a young man named Jimmy pulls an inscribed ring from the wreck of a plane that went down during the war and sets out, stubbornly, to return it to its owner. Against that runs 1943: a young Ethel Ann (Mischa Barton) loves the pilot Teddy, sees him off to the front, and never sees him again. Christopher Plummer plays the man who guarded her secret all his life, with Neve Campbell and Pete Postlethwaite alongside.

This turned out to be Attenborough's final film as director, and he made it about how someone else's loyalty can thaw a frozen heart. The tagline offers the love of a lifetime, and the picture takes its unhurried, old-fashioned time getting there. It's for viewers who like sentimental stories of war and memory played straight. Stream Closing the Ring (2007) online on iFILM.