Nowhere Spe­cial

John (James Nor­ton) spends his life look­ing through win­dows. He wash­es them for a liv­ing, which means that each day when he climbs his lad­der, cloth and buck­et in hand, he’s grant­ed a brief glimpse into the lives of strangers – a cru­el reminder of the secu­ri­ty and sta­bil­i­ty he is soon to lose.

The sto­ry of a hard-up sin­gle dad who tries to imag­ine a bet­ter future for his four-year-old son, Nowhere Spe­cial is a bit­ter­sweet dra­ma about the per­ils of par­ent­hood. More gen­er­al­ly, it’s con­cerned with the fin­er points of social wel­fare, the adop­tion process, and the life-chang­ing impli­ca­tions of rehom­ing a human being.

Although John is shown to be a lov­ing and atten­tive dad, it’s revealed ear­ly on that he has recent­ly been diag­nosed with a ter­mi­nal ill­ness. Giv­en just months to live, the last and most impor­tant deci­sion he will ever make is to find young Michael (Daniel Lam­ont) a new fam­i­ly who will nur­ture him and give him the oppor­tu­ni­ties John him­self was denied.

If there’s the poten­tial for much heart-string manip­u­la­tion con­tained with­in that premise, writer/​director Uber­to Pasoli­ni is wise to pull gen­tly; eschew­ing cheap sen­ti­men­tal­ism and cloy­ing melo­dra­ma, his film is most affect­ing when it focus­es on every­day moments between father and son, such as putting can­dles on a birth­day cake, wash­ing a car, or going gro­cery shopping.

Through­out all this, John must endure an ago­nis­ing wait to see where Michael will end up, and even more wor­ry­ing­ly, con­tem­plate the thought that he may grow up with only a vague mem­o­ry of their all-too-brief time togeth­er. The scenes where John and Michael vis­it prospec­tive fos­ter par­ents range from awk­ward to dis­as­trous, but Pasoli­ni is care­ful to nev­er pass judge­ment on any of the adults involved. It’s sim­ply the case that some peo­ple are not a good match, while oth­ers may be offer­ing to take on the extra respon­si­bil­i­ty for the wrong reasons.

The irony is that, under dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances, none of this would be nec­es­sary because Michael already has every­thing he needs, despite the absence of his moth­er (which is only explained in pass­ing). This makes John’s posi­tion, not to men­tion that of social ser­vices, all the more com­pli­cat­ed. Indeed, the grav­i­ty of his sit­u­a­tion and the weight of his deci­sion are rein­forced, in a some­what on-the-nose man­ner, through var­i­ous shop win­dow dis­plays – head­stones in a funer­al home, plush ani­mals in a toy store – which he rou­tine­ly encoun­ters at work.

Pasolini’s last fea­ture was the Eddie Marsan coun­cil work­er dra­ma Still Life, from 2013, and on the strength of this long over­due fol­low-up it’s a bit of a head scratch­er as to why he’s been so qui­et over the past eight years. Nor­ton, mean­while, builds on his impres­sive epony­mous per­for­mance in Agniesz­ka Holland’s Mr Jones, as well as his sup­port­ing turn in Gre­ta Gerwig’s Lit­tle Women as the reserved tutor John Brooke.

Admit­ted­ly there’s not much nar­ra­tive juice left in Nowhere Spe­cial by the end, but it’s a com­pe­tent­ly made and com­pelling­ly act­ed film which will hope­ful­ly lead to us see­ing a lot more of both film­mak­er and lead actor.