An
edited film review by Lee Marshall for screendaily.com on 1 Sept 2017.
A
heartwarming, bed warming twilight-years romance starring Robert Redford and Jane
Fonda, Our Souls at Night is a Netflix-produced
charmer which screened at this year’s Venice Film Festival, and does what it
says on the box - right down to its TV-friendly aspect ratio.
Adapted
from the novel of the same name, which Colorado writer Kent Haruf completed weeks before his death in 2014, Our Souls at Night gets its neat,
talking-point premise out of the way in the first couple of minutes. A widowed
older woman knocks on the door of a similarly lonely male neighbor one evening,
and proposes that they begin sleeping together. It’s not about sex, she tells him. It’s about getting through the night.
Nothing
of what follows will be surprising, but that’s not to belittle a tender film
that goes beyond twinkly silver-haired romance to examine how the arrangement
entered into by Addie and Louis is as good a way of any of getting close to a
person and with as much chance of success as blood-ties or marriage. It’s just
that there’s an air of well-oiled, made-for-TV efficiency about the exercise
that extends from Lunchbox director Ritesh Batra’s safe hand on the tiller
to Stephen Goldblatt’s golden-light
photography.
Everything,
in the end, seems to revolve around the brilliant casting. Like the pairing of
Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn in On
Golden Pond, this is a career celebration as much as a drama, one that’s
given extra relevance, and poignancy, by Redford’s recent announcement that he
is giving up acting to focus on directing.
Like
her character, Jane Fonda makes all the running as smart, self-assured Addie,
while Redford’s pared-back account of widower Louis seems more about simply
being there than losing himself a role – though to be fair, this is actually
quite a compelling quality, one that was also exploited in JC Chandor’s ocean
survival tale All Is Lost. Here too,
this lack of demonstrativeness fits his character, a retired schoolteacher who has
retreated into himself while keeping up social appearances by hanging out with
a crew of bantering buddies, including curmudgeon Dorlan Becker (Bruce Dern) at the local diner in
all-white, small-town Holt, Colorado (actually filmed in Florence, Canon City,
Colorado Springs and Denver).
Elegant
Addie lives in a tasteful, antique-peppered suburban house and likes to drink
red wine. Beer-drinker Louis’ furniture looks like it was ordered by the yard,
probably not by him. He has a whole rack of checkered flannel shirts, all in
shades of blue to match his eyes, and he’s so used to TV dinners he neglects to
turn the weather forecast off when Addie first comes to visit. It’s this disconnect
that powers the gentle dramedy of the film’s early scenes, after Louis agrees
to Addie’s decently indecent proposal, and the two settle down in her bed for
their first awkward night together.
Gradually,
in the course of dinners and night-talks, we will find out about their former
partners, about the 11 year-old daughter Addie lost, about the affair that
Louis had forty years previously with a fellow teacher. There are grown-up kids
too - traditional dramatic barriers to the blossoming of late-life romance –
and sure enough Addie’s troubled son Gene (Matthias
Schoenaerts) arrives, complete with failing marriage and business, to glare
at Louis and remind his mother how much her new boyfriend hurt his wife and
daughter Holly (Judy Greer) by
cheating on her all those years ago.
When
Gene leaves his own seven year-old son Jamie (Iain Armitage) with grandma Addie while he tries to sort his life
out, it’s a test for a couple who are still checking each other out -
especially when the insecure little boy asks to sleep in the big bed. It’s also
a chance for the script to twin feel-good golden-years romance with
good-old-days nostalgia, as Louis, who never had a son, weans Jamie off his
smartphone games by getting out a train set, buying him a cute dog at a rescue
shelter and taking him and Addie on a Rockies camping expedition. This is all
of a piece with the film’s first shot: a Midwest windmill whirring atop its
derrick. It lasts a couple of seconds, but it tells us what we’re getting as
efficiently as a three-page synopsis. [Marshall’s rating: 3.5 stars out of 5 =
70%]
Blogger’s
comment: This is Redford and Fonda’s fourth film after The Chase (1966), Barefoot in
the Park (1967) and The Electric
Horseman (1979). I always felt they worked well together although there
wasn’t a lot of romantic chemistry between them but, after doing some research and reading some interviews I discovered that the lack of chemistry has never been from Fonda's side. It turns out she's been in love with Redford for fifty years, since they did Barefoot in the Park, so much so that she would look into his eyes and forget her lines. And Redford? He had absolutely no idea she was in love with him. The lesson here? If you love someone, tell them. You might never get another chance.
Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Electric Horseman (1979) and Our Souls at Night (2017). To me, these pictures mean that whether we are a celebrity or an unknown, eventually we will all pass from the scene. And to quote the final lyrics in the last song The End from the Beatles' last album Abbey Road, 1969: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Electric Horseman (1979) and Our Souls at Night (2017). To me, these pictures mean that whether we are a celebrity or an unknown, eventually we will all pass from the scene. And to quote the final lyrics in the last song The End from the Beatles' last album Abbey Road, 1969: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
Labels:
drama, Netflix, romance
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