Song for Marion, review - Telegraph Maybe it's opportunism, maybe Williams is mellowing with age. Either way, his latest film plays like an update of the time-honoured Full Monty formula - public exhibitionism vanquishes English emotional reserve - for a post-Glee world. The documentary Young@Heart may also have been an influence. Its central conflict is established during the opening credits. Terence Stamp's grumpy Arthur is trudging joylessly through his housing estate; he's off to pick up happy-clappy wife Marion (Vanessa Redgrave) from her weekly date with a pensioner a cappella group known as "The OAPz." Marion has a tumour to go with the tunes inside her head, giving the plot its mild momentum: the question is whether the music can get the socially awkward Arthur ("you know how I feel about enjoying things") to open up before it's too late. Where Williams's earlier films possessed the grim urgency of midnight movies, here he defaults to the look and feel of afternoon television: all that's missing are the ads for walk-in baths. The pitch is somewhere on the level of Pensioners Do (And Sing) The Funniest Things. As Gemma Arterton - whose too-sweet-to-be-true vocal coach really ought to be named Miss Honey or Miss Virtue - guides the old-timers through a toe-tensing rendition of Let's Talk About Sex, some may feel that Arthur's crotchety demeanour is entirely reasonable. Yet this kind of community-centre cinema is dependent more than most on who shows up, and here Stamp proves Williams's trump card. Rarely sounding a false note, he's often seen willing the material past its own limitations: one off-screen howl of regret comes as both unexpected (in a film so determinedly peppy) and strangely, suggestively musical. After that, we're but a song away from an understated finale: Arthur, repositioned centre stage to croak Billy Joel's Lullaby, while a single tear trickles down Stamp's skull-like features. Extraordinary thing, the potency of cheap music.