DAFFY DOG movies are nothing new, especially around Christmas-time, but this week's new release Dean Spanley is - as the commentators at Crufts might say - in a class of its own. It has one of those plots which make it difficult to say anything about the story without letting the cat out of the cinematic bag: but here goes. The setting is Edwardian England, all top hats and elegant interiors. Old Fisk is a bitter bully who treats his son like an irksome stranger.
Nevertheless, Young Fisk visits the old man every week, taking him on various outings in a vain attempt to divert him. When he succumbs to a mischievous impulse and brings his father to a lecture on reincarnation, they encounter a mysterious clergyman: the eponymous Dean.
Intrigued by the cleric's open-minded views on the afterlife - and his fondness for Hungarian dessert wine - Young Fisk invites Dean Spanley to dinner where, after a few glasses of Tokay, he comes up with some pretty offbeat conversational gambits.
What sets the film apart from other stories of the supernatural, and especially from other "shaggy dog" tales, is its wry tone, frank eccentricity and tightly-knit ensemble cast.
Peter O'Toole and Jeremy Northam star as Fisk senior and junior, Sam Neill takes the title role and Bryan Brown - yes, that inevitable Aussie - is in delightful form as the fixer who procures the wine. Think Remains of the Day, with dogs.
Whether this quirkiness will endear Dean Spanley to mainstream movie audiences or simply sink it without trace, nobody associated with the film yet knows.
"It's unusual," offers Sam Neill, as he attacks a plate of spotted dick in the upstairs room of a Soho club ahead of the film's premiere at the London Film Festival. "It's a curiously profound meditation on a number of things, it seems to me."
Neill is probably best known for his wide-eyed action-man performance as Dr Alan Grant in Jurassic Park. But he has played everything from the Antichrist in Omen III and Reilly: Ace of Spies in the hugely popular television series to the dingo-distressed dad in A Cry in the Dark.
By comparison, you might think the soft-spoken Dean Spanley would be a doddle. Not so, says Neill, delicately disembowelling another portion of pudding.
"I'm storytelling, really - it's a storytelling role. So I was scared stiff to be boring. I was really scared, you know? I didn't know if I'd be able to pull it off. But I was really happy to be part of that tight little band of actors. And I think we made something that was kind of heartfelt."
The word comes out as haht-felt, for although he was born in Omagh, Co Tyrone (while his father Dermot was doing a British army stint in Northern Ireland), Neill grew up in New Zealand.
When he's not making movies, he spends his time on the South Island, cultivating organic vegetables and producing a highly successful wine. Did he relish the opportunity to do so much baroque on-screen sipping in Dean Spanley?
"Oh, yes," he says. "There's something of a parody at work there. All the wine critics I've ever met are in there somewhere."
Despite the mammoth amounts of vintage vino which are supposedly quaffed as the film proceeds, Neill can't recall ever having tasted the miraculous Tokay.
"I'd like to tell you that's what we were actually drinking on set, but of course it wasn't," he says. "They were long shooting days. We would have been insensible."
He pauses, then adds suddenly. "Our wine importer in Dublin disappeared." I had been wondering about this, having tried - and failed - to procure a bottle of Two Paddocks pinot noir before we met. Strictly for research purposes, you understand.
Now I'm wondering what, exactly, Neill means by "disappeared". He looks puzzled. Then he laughs. "Oh, right," he says. "Nothing sinister. I think he just went under. We suddenly never heard from him again. I don't know what happened. It is bizarre, though. He was in a little office on one of those squares there - what are they called? Not Fitzwilliam Square. Not Stephen's Green. You went down steps. It might have been Merrion Square."
This doesn't sound terribly reassuring, and for a moment we both contemplate the possible fates which might await a wine merchant who has to ascend a flight of steps at the end of a day's work. The sombre theme fits perfectly with Dean Spanley, as it happens.
INITIALLY, NEILL turned down the role, and had to be persuaded otherwise by his compatriot, the New Zealand director Toa Fraser. What made the script stand out for him was its offbeat, almost matter-of-fact exploration of the theme of grief and loss.
"The thing about grief is, it's like a very long note on a piano," he says.
"It sustains for a very long time. Even when you think it should have gone, if you listen carefully it's still there." Neill experienced this at first hand in his own family. "My mother's father was killed in the first war. She only had one sibling, and her brother died just at the end of the second war. My mother was a very positive, cheerful person - but you sort of knew, if you were tuning on all the right channels, that there was still something of that grief in her."
His maternal grandmother, meanwhile, had an even tougher time of it.
"My grandmother was a widow from 1917. It's something I'd never really considered, you know? She's just your grandmother, who you love. But when you think about how much she must have suffered by losing a husband who she adored - and then losing her only son 20 years later. I would have thought that was insupportable."
In Dean Spanley, Old Fisk has lost his elder son to war. "This boy is clearly the favoured son, so there's an awful lot of unexpressed grief in the film - and a lot of mad laughter. When the sheep come over the top of the hill. . ." Uh-oh. Let's not go there, unless we want this interview to get a "spoiler" notice slapped all over it.
Instead we talk about what's coming up next for him. Plenty, is the answer. "I've got a vampire film to come," he says. "Then there's a film about apartheid in South Africa with Sophie Okonedo, called Skin. I just finished a 13-hour thing for NBC called Robinson Crusoe. And there's a kids' film called Under the Mountain. So there's a bit of a backlog."
AS IF STUFFED WITH BOTH films and food, Neill abandons the last spoonfuls of custard and sits back on his sofa. "You know what?" he asks, with startling suddenness. "I got an Irish passport the other day. I love it. It's the best thing in my pocket."
Until the envelope arrived in the post, he was unaware that being born in Northern Ireland now entitles him to multiple international identities - appropriately enough for the actor who played the lead role in Reilly: Ace of Spies.
But is it any use? "Well, we'll see," he says. "I think when I'm in dodgy parts of the world I'll have it very close to my chest. When hijackers get on the bus, that's the one I'll produce. Because no one hates the Irish. Mind you, no one hates the New Zealanders either. But that's because they've never heard of New Zealanders."
They have now, I protest. I mean, Flight of the Conchords, and all that? "Oh, well, there you are," Neill concludes with an air of triumph.
"No one hates Flight of the Conchords." Whether this is a compliment or a condemnation, it's impossible to tell. Like his enigmatic alias, Dean Spanley, Sam Neill is in a class of his own.
• Dean Spanley is on general release
THE BARONY of Dunsany is one of the oldest of Irish peerages and one of just a handful which stretches, unbroken, back to the 14th - or maybe even the 13th - century.
There still is a Lord Dunsany, who may or may not be amused by the fact that his ancestor's 1936 short novel, My Talks With Dean Spanley, has been made into a feature film.
No one who knew the 18th baron, however, would have been in the least surprised.
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett was a playwright and author of a fistful of fantasy stories, including a novel called The King of Elfland's Daughter.
He was also quite a character on the Anglo-Irish scene, being a pistol-shooting champion of Ireland as well as a pal of poets such as WB Yeats and Francis Ledwidge. The lord's uncle was the nationalist and agricultural reformer Horace Plunkett. The 18th baron was also a committed animal-rights campaigner, much opposed - it will surprise no one who has seen the movie version of Dean Spanley to learn - to the docking of dogs' tails.
He was undoubtedly ahead of his time in that respect. What he probably didn't foresee was that when his novel about an eccentric English cleric would finally make it to the big screen, the writer who adapted it - Alan Sharp - would insert a character, Old Fisk; or that the actor playing that character, Peter O'Toole, would effortlessly steal the show at the age of 76.
According to the production notes for the film, reading the script was something of a blast from the past for O'Toole.
"I've not heard of Lord Dunsany for 50 years," he said. "I looked through his credits, and I remembered him for three works. I knew him as a short-story writer and I knew him as a playwright, but not for 50 years have I even heard his name.
"An amazing man, as we now know - and a great chess champion."
Whether the film is praised or panned, it might be worth bearing in mind - come Oscar season - that O'Toole has been nominated eight times for an Academy award and that his time may have come with this career-capping performance.
The 18th Lord Dunsany would surely permit himself a bob or two on that one.
