"Mrs. Palfrey" is out of this modern world

In "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont," Joan Plowright plays an elderly widow who moves to London in search of culture, like minds and the company of her only grandson, Desmond. But the elegant hotel she anticipated turns out to be a shabby pensioners home, its residents a waxworks of empire-in-decline types (one is even a ruddy-cheeked major) and young Desmond a no-show. Just as the reality of her new life is beginning to sink in -- Mrs. Palfrey appears to have checked herself into Jean-Paul Sartre's lost teleplay for the BBC2 -- she falls into an unlikely friendship with Ludovic Meyer (Rupert Friend), an aspiring writer roughly a quarter her age.

Ludo is a soul whose art and sensibilities seem to require that he live in this century as though it were the last. So he spends his days pounding out stories on a manual typewriter so creaky it makes an IBM Selectric look futuristic, busking on the subway and breaking his mother's heart. When Mrs. Palfrey trips and falls in front of his apartment one afternoon, Ludo invites her inside for some tea and sympathy. Before long, he's happily impersonating Desmond for the benefit of Mrs. Palfrey's new chums, transforming himself into the "mythical grandson" of the Claremont's collective dreams.

"Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont" is a low-key weepy about loneliness and (possibly) learning to conform one's romantic expectations to reality. The loneliness -- thanks largely to Plowright's affecting performance -- it does well. Plowright and Friend's warm connection makes their friendship plausible, especially as the actress beautifully calibrates the ratio of shy hesitation, grandmotherly doting and urbane camaraderie that characterizes her affection for the lad. But it's harder to buy the movie in a larger context, as the world its protagonists inhabit bears little resemblance to the real one. It's not just that most of the secondary characters seem to have wandered out of the pages of an Agatha Christie novel or a mid-'70s Mike Leigh set. It's that their expectations of life are just enough out of step with the contemporary world to make them seem eccentric, if not cracked. Why, for instance, would the perspicacious Mrs. Palfrey, no matter her age, dress for dinner on her first night at a place like the Claremont in this day and age? And why would Ludo spend his days submitting typewritten manuscripts who knows where, when he could be, I don't know, blogging?