Old Yorker

  • The Old Man & the Gun

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Lowery (2018)

    In the Q&A that followed a preview of A Ghost Story at Curzon Soho last year, the few words David Lowery said about his next film were enough to make clear how much he admired Robert Redford and saw The Old Man & the Gun as a tribute to him.  Redford indicated in late 2016 that this movie would be his acting swansong; he confirmed it this August  – the month of his eighty-second birthday and in which The Old Man & the Gun had its world premiere at the Telluride festival.  Lowery’s crime comedy, for which he also wrote the screenplay, is based on an article of the same name by David Grann, published in the New Yorker in 2003.  The old man of Grann’s profile was Forrest Tucker, a career criminal and serial prison escape artist, who was still robbing banks at the age of seventy-nine.  (Tucker died in jail in 2004.)  Commemorating Robert Redford in the role of a lawbreaker might seem fitting in view of the characters he played in two of his most commercially successful films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, both directed by George Roy Hill.

    This certainly isn’t the only way of representing the actor, though; and my immediate reaction was to regret it was the one Lowery had chosen.  In the 1970s, Redford was just as much the go-to leading man for politically serious drama (The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men).  He’s been memorable too as the unattainable heart’s desire of strong and strongly played women characters (Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were, Meryl Streep in Out of Africa).  Pauline Kael dismissed The Sting as a film for ‘people – and no doubt there are quantities of them – who like crooks as sweeties’.  Count me out:  longstanding antipathy to the cinema of lovable rogues made me apprehensive about seeing The Old Man & the Gun at the London Film Festival and there’s no doubt that Lowery glamorises the protagonist.  Yet his film is highly entertaining and enjoyable.

    Much of the action takes place in the second half of 1981, when Forrest Tucker is carrying out his latest series of bank robberies.  (He wasn’t yet sixty at the time so the fact that Redford doesn’t look his age helps considerably.).  Tucker uses a standard technique.  He wears a suit, tie, fedora, false moustache and hearing aid; he looks a respectable elderly gent.  When he enters a bank, he asks for the manager and then about a loan.  In answer to the question what kind of loan, Tucker replies, ‘This kind’, and points a gun, though he never pulls the trigger.  Bank staff then fill his brief case with cash and he exits quietly.  He sometimes works alone, sometimes with two accomplices (Danny Glover and Tom Waits).  The ‘Over the Hill Gang’, as they’re dubbed by police and media, start in Texas and move on to Oklahoma and Missouri.  (The screen shows the exact location, date and time – to the minute – of each heist.)  The investigating police team in Dallas is headed by the aptly named John Hunt (Casey Affleck).  As the geographical scope of the bank jobs widens, federal agents, to Hunt’s chagrin, also get involved.

    Lowery is romanticising Robert Redford rather than Forrest Tucker.  When Hunt looks at photos of the young Tucker, we see photos of the young Redford.  Lowery inserts a brief clip of him in Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966) into a chronologically ordered montage of the hero’s prison escapes (the total is well into double figures).  Tucker’s chance meeting with a widow called Jewel (Sissy Spacek) starts a relationship that’s central to the story.  He tells her that his name is Bob.   Jewel keeps horses; Tucker says that riding one is on his bucket list and ticks it off the list immediately before the police eventually arrest him.  Being in the saddle may be a new experience for Tucker but not for the Bob playing him.  Throughout the film, Lowery takes every opportunity to focus on his leading man’s well-preserved face, more or less knowing that he’ll be the last filmmaker to have such an opportunity.

    It’s something of an irony that you keep thinking Redford is rather miscast.  Even though David Grann described Forrest Tucker as ‘a striking-looking man, with intense blue eyes’, the mug shots of the real Tucker online suggest he was no oil painting.  Movie transformations of real people into more conventionally attractive actors are legion but there’s a particular issue here when, at their first meeting, Jewel says to Tucker, with friendly amusement, ‘Look at you all dressed up in your blue suit!’  There’s a suggestion that his old codger lineaments and natty outfit are a humorous mismatch – that Tucker, unused to dressing smartly except when he’s on a job, overdoes the dapper look to almost comical effect.  With Redford in the role, that’s not the case:  this handsome octogenarian wears well in all respects.  But although this is niggling on a realistic level, it makes sense in terms of the film’s essential subject.  Being better-looking than the original has been an enduring, almost inevitable criticism of casting Robert Redford as real-life characters, from Bob Woodward through Denys Finch Hatton to Bill Bryson.

    The strength of Lowery’s desire to celebrate Redford is a big part of what makes The Old Man & the Gun likeable.  And Redford’s variously distinguished service to American cinema, combined with his longevity as a star, makes him worth celebrating:  for his support for independent cinema through the Sundance festival etc; as a director, for continuing to choose subjects that were personally important to him.  I’ve often found him exasperatingly self-protective as an actor, the exasperation greater because the evidence of his natural gifts has convinced me he could go further.  Wearing a suit that looks OK on him and is too tasteful for Forrest Tucker is typical of this side of Redford.  The kind of intelligence he projects is perhaps too sophisticated for Tucker.  Yet his trademark reserve and a performing style far removed from character acting are assets here.  Redford is effortlessly charming.  He doesn’t work to make Tucker appealing.

    Two other factors help The Old Man & the Gun rise above the ‘crooks as sweeties’ level.  David Lowery interrogates – though only gently – the cliché of the incorrigible rogue.  There’s the odd moment when Tucker’s face registers that threatening someone with a gun is in itself a vicious, terrorising act.  According to a sheriff (Daniel Britt) who once arrested him, Tucker justified his recidivism not as a way of making a living but as ‘living’:  his eventual decision to leave the loyal Jewel to make a criminal comeback confirms a virtual addiction to daylight robbery.  Television news reports on the Over the Hill Gang are delivered in a jocose, patronising tone.  These are senior citizens so they must be innocuous.  This makes us realise that’s how we, as an audience, see them too.  The other, more important means of lifting the film is John Hunt and the actor playing him.

    According to a piece on Slate[1], the real Hunt ‘played a more minor role … he was not a detective from Dallas but a sergeant with the Austin police’.  Lowery enlarges his importance in the story both to rework the crime-movie trope of the law officer who develops respect for a lawbreaking adversary and to create a dual character study.  Lowery’s regular collaborator Casey Affleck is the ideal choice to complement the film’s easy, genial aspect.  He grounds the police pursuit of Tucker in hard-slog reality:  Hunt, who ‘celebrates’ his fortieth birthday at the start of the story, is conscientious but jaded at work.  What works so well is that Lowery combines this with a family life for Hunt that’s happy and secure.  His wife Maureen (Tika Sumpter) and their two young children (Ari Elizabeth Johnson and Teagan Johnson) know he’s inclined to be a grouch and don’t love him any less for that.  Affleck’s physical acting is expressive at every level.  In an early scene, as Maureen greets Hunt on his return from work, we see – though it’s conveyed without any dramatic emphasis – how much he takes refuge in her embrace.  (This couple are a welcome instance of a rare screen phenomenon – an interracial marriage that’s never remarked upon.)  In a subsequent sequence, Hunt, sitting in his kitchen, turns a dial to change stations on a radio just behind him.  Affleck does this so naturally that it registers as part of Hunt’s routine – a small detail but one that enriches the picture of his domestic world.

    Casey Affleck isn’t known as a great smiler:  when his growing fascination with Tucker causes Hunt occasionally to grin and even laugh out loud, it drives home how much difference the old man is professionally re-energising the middle-aged one.  David Lowery melds the real world of Hunt/Affleck and the crime caper form smoothly:  the two sequences in which Tucker and Hunt are on screen at the same time are amusing conceits, staged in a way that makes them seem credible.  Hunt and his son happen to be in a bank just as a robbery is going on there – the manager (Gene Jones) announces this to his customers after Tucker has left the building.  Later on, Hunt and his wife, on the spur of the moment, go out to eat at a place where Tucker and Jewel are also sharing a table.  The exchange between Redford and Affleck, when the two men meet face to face in the gents, is a comic delight.  Confronting Tucker, Hunt doesn’t attempt to arrest him but other officers are soon on Tucker’s tail and it’s during the next few hours that he’s apprehended.  Earlier on, Hunt’s daughter warned her father that, ‘If you caught him, you wouldn’t get to chase him anymore’ and she was right.  Maureen thinks she’s commiserating when she tells her husband she’s sorry he’s not the one who arrested Tucker.  ‘I’m not’, is the eloquent reply.

    The first-rate supporting cast includes Elisabeth Moss (in a single scene as the daughter Tucker hasn’t seen since she was a babe in arms), Keith Carradine, John David Washington and Isiah Whitlock Jr.  It’s especially good to see Sissy Spacek again.  Her Jewel – good-humoured, observant, quietly rueful – is a lovely partner for Redford.  Spacek’s delivery of an affecting monologue about getting older is particularly fine.  David Lowery’s screenplay is well constructed and features excellent dialogue:  each character has an individual voice.  The direction is even more impressive.  It may not have been difficult to make a film remarkably different from the singular A Ghost Story but the combination of momentum and relaxation in Lowery’s storytelling here is close to elating.  The Old Man & the Gun is not just a graceful last bow for Robert Redford but confirmation of the talent of a still young movie-maker (Lowery is thirty-seven).  To my surprise, this turned out to be one of those films that make me grateful that I love films and for how long I’ve loved watching them.

    13 October 2018

    [1] https://slate.com/culture/2018/09/the-old-man-and-the-gun-fact-vs-fiction-robert-redford-movie.html

     

  • Thunder Road

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jim Cummings (2018)

    Thunder Road, showing at the London Film Festival, begins with a funeral service and a eulogy delivered by the dead woman’s son.  We first see Jim Arnaud, dressed in his police officer’s uniform, near the entrance to the chapel.  He’s checking anxiously that a pink boombox, which doesn’t look as if it belongs to him, is in working order.  Once Jim comes to the front of the chapel to speak, he faces the camera and it stays on him almost continuously for the next ten minutes.  During this time, Jim rambles, dries briefly and starts crying whenever he recalls being ‘mean’ to his mother.   When he turns on the boombox – to play one of her favourite songs, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’ – nothing happens.   So Jim describes to the gathering the song’s lyrics and what they meant to his mother.  He starts moving to the music he can hear in his head.

    I knew beforehand that Thunder Road was about a man who suffers a breakdown following the death of his mother.  Even allowing that this is the funeral of someone near and dear to him, the long opening sequence shows Jim emotionally out of control to an exceptional degree:  here is a man having something close to a breakdown before our eyes.  The impression is intensified because the camera doesn’t let us look away.  We see only a little reaction from others present, shocked though they must be by what they’re witnessing.  The impact of this introduction is unquestionable.  You wonder how the writer-director Jim Cummings, who also plays Jim, is going to take things forward.

    Jim and his wife Ros (Jocelyn DeBoer) are in the process of divorcing.  Their daughter Crystal (Kendal Farr), aged ten or eleven (and the owner of the pink boombox), has been spending time with each parent since they separated but her mother is applying for sole custody – even though Ros appears to have a drugs problem.  Jim demonstrates repeatedly that he has a problem of anger management.  He goes ballistic while doing his job, in an interview with Crystal’s class teacher (Macon Blair), even with an unfailingly kind fellow officer (Nican Robinson) – who, with his wife (Ammie Leonards), does his best to support Jim and relieve his isolation.   Neither of his siblings put in an appearance at the funeral.  When Jim briefly visits his sister Morgan (Chelsea Edmundson) and asks about her relationship with their mother, Morgan’s response suggests that she has always been as miserable as Jim is now.   He has lost a beloved parent, the custody battle, most of his inheritance (consumed in legal costs) and, as a result of his crazy outbursts, his job.  Until the very last moments of Thunder Road, the situation seems hopeless.  Jim Cummings, in short, details the unhappy context of the protagonist’s life and makes bad things happen to him but doesn’t really develop Jim as a character.  Cummings, rather, elaborates a personality – needy, volatile, self-centred, short on self-awareness – that’s evident in Jim’s behaviour in the chapel.

    Although it holds your attention, the story is thin and seems to have nothing new to say.  I came out almost puzzled as to why the film had been made.  Once I’d read a bit online about Thunder Road, things became clearer.  It’s based on a twelve-minute piece of the same name, which won the Grand Jury prize for best short film at Sundance in 2016.  Jim Cummings raised money through Kickstarter to develop the material into a feature.  Almost needless to say, the short consists entirely of Jim’s funeral eulogy.  (Cummings’s synopsis for Sundance was all of five words:  ‘Officer Arnaud loved his Mom’.)  The 2016 film (available on Vimeo) has three particularly striking features.  First, the camera’s zoom in towards Jim seems more gradual than in the longer version:  he doesn’t confront the viewer in the same way.   Second, the boombox misbehaves only momentarily:  the Springsteen track then plays and Jim sings and dances along to it.  Third, the mixture of sad and funny in the short is confounding:  in comparison, the feature film and the funeral episode within it are predominantly distressing and the occasional comic touches tend to derive from the grotesqueness of incidents.

    Because Jim’s performance of ‘Thunder Road’ at the funeral in the expanded film is relatively limited, Cummings seems to think he’s keeping plenty in reserve but that’s not so – and not only because the lack of accompanying music makes Jim’s song-and-dance act in the feature much weirder than in the short.  It’s understandable that Cummings doesn’t want to jettison the eulogy but, by retaining and beginning with it, he places his dramatic highlight first and renders much of what follows in this ninety-two-minute film essentially superfluous.  Jim’s subsequent outbursts count for less because of what the opening ten minutes have revealed about him.

    Cummings makes use of the lyrics of ‘Thunder Road’ to devise a mildly upbeat ending to the feature.  The let’s-get-out-of-here thrust of the song[1] is reflected in Jim’s eventual escape from the small Texas town where the previous action has taken place.  Ros has died of a drugs overdose; Jim has Crystal with him.   In the final scene, they go to a theatre to watch a ballet – the art his mother loved and, for as long as she could, practised.  Crystal watches with interest the dancers on the stage.  Jim’s eyes fill with tears.   There’s a salving quality to this moment, for sure.  It comes as a relief after the load of trauma that’s gone before, though you still don’t hold out much hope for Jim Arnaud’s future.

    Jim Cummings’s future could be a different matter:

    ‘The 30-year-old writer-director-actor who won Sundance’s short film grand jury prize in 2016 seems to have found the holy grail for up-and-coming filmmakers:  steady work.  A former freelance line producer for College Humor in Los Angeles, Cummings recently transitioned into writing, directing and acting full time, and now has so many projects going simultaneous[l]y that it’s hard to believe he was as an unknown filmmaker just 18 months ago. …’

    This is from a piece that appeared on IndieWire even before Cummings had raised funds to make the longer Thunder Road, which has won prizes at a succession of American festivals during this year.   It’s probably helped Cummings that, in the interval between the two versions of his film, America has become Trumpland.  Owen Gleiberman, in his highly enthusiastic Variety review, praises the feature Thunder Road as ‘one of the first dramas to dig deep into America’s heartland crisis — the crush of the spirit that has emerged from a collapsing job market and drug addiction and the underlying loss of faith’.  It’s far from clear that this is what Cummings had in mind – he seems interested in Jim Arnaud as an extraordinary individual – but it’s not surprising the film is being seen in these terms.

    Cummings has written some acute dialogue and directs the cast well – especially the child who plays Crystal:  Kendal Farr moves between sullen and sensitive very naturally.  The closing credits begin with ‘written, directed and performed by Jim Cummings’, before moving on to the rest of the cast.  That ‘performed’ is significant:  it hints at both the extended sketch origins of the material and an aspect of Cummings’s acting.  He creates a physically convincing figure – as Owen Gleiberman says, Jim Arnaud is ‘trim and handsome, with a conservative haircut, but he has the kind of mustache that no one wears anymore’.  But I disagree with Gleiberman’s praise of Cummings’s displays of grief as deeply credible:  he always looks to be pretending to be upset (to such an extent that I wondered early on if Jim Arnaud was faking distress).  Cummings is at his best when Jim is relatively in control.  He shows good comic timing with lines that are ironic, either in intention or in effect.  Although I found Thunder Road unsatisfying and the lead’s playing patchy, I’m keen to see more from Jim Cummings – in front of or behind the camera.

    11 October 2018

    [1]  ‘Hey, what else can we do now?/Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair/Well, the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere/We got one last chance to make it real …’

Posts navigation