Sunday, April 29, 2018
The Money Seeker (spoilers)
As we Boomers age, there’s an increasing number of films
that aim to provide succor for our pains, reassuringly telling us that we’ve
still got it inside, despite the infirmities and the charming little foibles of
our dotage. “Young@Heart,” the documentary about nursing home residents playing
and belting out current pop hits of their grandchildrens’ generation was the
best of these because, well, those folks still had it goin’ on. “The BestExotic Marigold Hotel” (first one only) wasn’t horrible, plus a great ensemble cast.
Way at the other end of the spectrum is “The Leisure Seeker” a criminal misuse of Donald Sutherland as a doddering old academic succumbing to a progressive dementia and an even greater criminal abuse of Helen Mirren as his cancer-wracked yet unweathered and gorgeous ex-Southern Belle wife who pines to show him Hemingway’s Key West home, which requires that they drive a 40-year-old rusty (plot point!) Winnebago from Wellesley to Key West, because flying Boston to Miami would not make much of a movie I guess.
It’s got the “Old people just can’t shut up” trope, run again and again. It’s got befuddled youngsters cowed into compliance with the old folks’ wishes through the sheer force of will. It's got a cancer victim who moans occasionally to presage what is only slowly revealed, where slowly means assuming that the audience is as intelligent as the average houseplant. (I found myself remembering fondly the old Carol Burnett Show, featuring a truly comic genius beauty, who would cough very softly just once whenever a sketch required that she indicate the presence of some fatal disease.) You’ve got your anxious and screechy antiques-loving middle-age son who is apparently still deeply closeted, though Helen (“Ella”) has her suspicions.
And it climaxes (ha ha!) with the miraculous Old Peen that gives Old Geezers the power to bestow healing on their cancer-ravaged septuagenarian wives, giving them the dewy afterglow and the courage to commit a murder-suicide. This proved to be a comfort in the end, as it assures that there can be no sequel.
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Way at the other end of the spectrum is “The Leisure Seeker” a criminal misuse of Donald Sutherland as a doddering old academic succumbing to a progressive dementia and an even greater criminal abuse of Helen Mirren as his cancer-wracked yet unweathered and gorgeous ex-Southern Belle wife who pines to show him Hemingway’s Key West home, which requires that they drive a 40-year-old rusty (plot point!) Winnebago from Wellesley to Key West, because flying Boston to Miami would not make much of a movie I guess.
It’s got the “Old people just can’t shut up” trope, run again and again. It’s got befuddled youngsters cowed into compliance with the old folks’ wishes through the sheer force of will. It's got a cancer victim who moans occasionally to presage what is only slowly revealed, where slowly means assuming that the audience is as intelligent as the average houseplant. (I found myself remembering fondly the old Carol Burnett Show, featuring a truly comic genius beauty, who would cough very softly just once whenever a sketch required that she indicate the presence of some fatal disease.) You’ve got your anxious and screechy antiques-loving middle-age son who is apparently still deeply closeted, though Helen (“Ella”) has her suspicions.
And it climaxes (ha ha!) with the miraculous Old Peen that gives Old Geezers the power to bestow healing on their cancer-ravaged septuagenarian wives, giving them the dewy afterglow and the courage to commit a murder-suicide. This proved to be a comfort in the end, as it assures that there can be no sequel.
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