*Lead actor Jeremy Irvine, plus Producer Pete Czernin, will join us in person for the screening on Monday 17: IT'S 2 TICKETS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!*

Tessa is seventeen and passionate about life. Diagnosed with a terminal illness, she determines to use every moment and compiles a list of what a normal teenager would experience. While her parents and brother each deal with their fear of losing her in their own way, Tessa explores a whole new world, determined to live every day as intensely as possible. Falling in love with Adam, her new neighbour, wasn’t on the list, but it proves to be the most exhilarating experience of them all. Based on the novel Before I Die by Jenny Downham, this is a heart-warming, and at times heart-wrenching, exploration of what really matters in life. A film that will stay with you long after you’ve left the cinema.

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Reviews Add a review

19 September 2012

The Agent Apsley wrote

The words of the film's title, Now is Good (2012), come as a reply when Tessa (skilfully played by Dakota Fanning) is asked on a date, and shortly before something unexpected happens. Knowing that she isn’t, she has been treating herself as if she were indestructible, much to the dismay of her father (Paddy Considine), who would have wanted her to persevere with having leukaemia treated.

He may no longer be seeking an answer that would save her for a while longer, but he has not given up thinking that things other than medical science may preserve her or that there is a sense in which he almost owns her remaining life. Much to her irritation, he is always trying to speak for her, whether to a radio-show host or the medical staff (and those people collude, as anyone who uses a wheelchair would tell you that they would).

However, tellingly, when Tessa asks the Macmillan nurse (with whom she had previously been a little abrasive, as if she represented not help for her, but an embodiment of what she was battling) what her last days have in store, they are alone. By contrast with her father, Tessa’s mother (Olivia Williams), from whom he is separated, does not seem much interested (though turns out to have her reasons for that appearance), and both parents ‘get to’ Tessa by failing to understand her needs and motivations.

Adam, the boy next door (who has had his own life affected by his father’s death in a crash), meets her when she stalks out with things from her bedroom wall that she wants burnt and starts putting them in the lit brazier of garden waste. Excellently played by Jeremy Irvine in dialogue that, of high quality throughout, reaches its peak of expressiveness when Tessa and he are talking, there is a sense of advanced maturity in Adam, which postponing study and acting as support to his mother probably has brought out in him.

The frailties that surround talking about and confronting death are fully explored (as when younger brother Cal, quite honestly, asks if they will go on holiday when Tessa is dead, because he doesn’t remember the previous trip to Spain), but, for all the tears that come at so many points in the second half, this is also a joyous film.

It makes you gasp at what people are capable of, as when Adam sets out to make Tessa famous, or surprises her by taking her up onto the cliffs. Tessa does not want to be thought of as brave, but she shows that she faith to reach out beyond and disregard the limitations of physical strength, and of the norms and mores that her father would have her obey.

Ol Parker has brought his own script beautifully to the screen, with cast and photography all of a piece in locating Tessa’s story in and around Brighton. And I think that it would be no less strong the second time, because the film is built around not what must happen, but about the relationships that make it something no longer to fear.

18 September 2012

HeatherS wrote

Rather like Hope Springs on the opening night of the Festival, Now is Good had the difficult job of do of striking a delicate balance between poignancy and humour and it managed it very well. The performances from all the main actors were excellent and I thought Olivia Williams and Paddy Considine complemented each other brilliantly - she the scatty parent who couldn't handle the grim reality of her daughter's illness and he the parent desperately trying to manage the unmanageable. The choice of locations also made it a visually attractive film, even if I agree with some other reviewers who found the horses and racing along the beach at sunset on a motorbike a tad cheesy (although if Jeremy Irvine would like to take me...). There were just one or two niggles for me as Dakota Fanning settled into her otherwise flawless English accent at the beginning and the scene outside the coffee shop where Tessa meets Adam under an umbrella in the rain. She then gets into her father's car to go home ... where the road is entirely dry, but that was either a continuity error or English summer! And unfortunately, while I did find it moving, I was more unnerved by being subjected to sobbing in stereo from more emotionally volatile neighbours!