Shifting points of view, subjective experience, and fluid chronology come easily to literature but get befuddled in the transition to the screen. Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of Graham Swift’s Last Orders takes on the original’s multivoiced, flashback structure but in so doing subverts much of the virtues of its brilliant ensemble cast.

Four men in a Mercedes head to the English seaside with the ashes of Jack (Michael Caine), a London butcher whose last orders were that his remains be dumped at Margate Pier; along the way, they launch into reminisces that are alternately revelatory and lugubrious. Ray (Bob Hoskins), Jack’s war buddy, has a guilty secret involving Amy (Helen Mirren), Jack’s wife; Jack’s son Vince (Ray Winstone) has a few skeletons of his own, incurring the pique of Jack’s ex-pug pal Lenny (David Hemmings). It’s all overseen by the Olympian eye of funeral director Vic (Tom Courtenay), who has the last word. Last Orders is fun, if self-consciously so, when these great talents mix it up in a scene, but when Schepisi tries to cram 40 years of a half-dozen lives into flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks, ad absurdum, the film deteriorates into chaos.