'Ordinary Love' review: Dramatic, affecting story of married couple facing a crisis

"Ordinary Love" tells exactly the story promised by its title, finding the pathos in the sort of small everyday moments that define a marriage even amid a moment of crisis. 

It's dramatic and affecting thanks to the work of stars Lesley Manville as Joan and Liam Neeson as Tom, a longtime married Northern Irish couple who finds their normal routine severely disrupted when Joan is diagnosed with cancer.

This might not sound like the most enticing formula for a night out at the movies and there's ample opportunity for this story to teeter into maudlin disease picture territory with Joan enduring a battery of tests and treatments.

But the screenplay by Owen McCafferty remains persistently understated, resistant to maudlin theatrics. The filmmakers Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn (a wife and husband themselves) allow the actors the space to generate something real and powerful.

Manville does an extraordinary job of playing a character facing mortality but refusing to be defined by her illness. She's sad and worried and suffering — the filmmakers utilize high angle shots and other smart visual techniques to show how dehumanizing the experience of shuffling through a medical system can be — but she retains a hopeful perspective as well.

The movie offers a welcome reminder that Neeson is one of our best actors, capable of so much more than the action movie schlock that occupies a lot of his time. He imbues Tom with quiet dignity and a sense of real, growing panic of his own, as he's forced to contemplate life without his bedrock.

The actors create a relationship that's defined by pain and suffering, to be sure, but also humor and warmth and the comfort of routine. When the characters take walks together, or hold each other, or sit down for dinner, the actors make us believe that they're there for each other, no matter what happens.

Despite all the tragedy that runs throughout the movie, there's something cathartic in that: the sense of a true partnership being tested by the hurdles life throws at it, becoming even stronger and more enduring with its inevitable end seeming more real.