The Leisure Seeker (15.)
Directed by Paolo Virzi.
Starring Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland, Janel Moloney, Christian McKay and Dick Gregory. 112 mins
Yes, it will be pronounced Lee Shure, and will be so pronounced by Helen Mirren, in a southern accent no less. There's no avoiding it. Said Lee Shure seeker is the name of an R.V that elderly married couple Ella (Mirren) and John (Sutherland) take off in to make one last road trip.
As the film started I wondered if I had gone to the wrong screening room The trailers had led me to expect a wacky old people acting outrageously and going on a zany, yet heartwarming adventure picture. The kind of film that is a little bit crazy, a little bit touching and almost entirely awful. The credits for this though listed a long, long list of Italian and European production companies and tax breaks that had clubbed together to make it, as well as noting that it had been entered in the Biennale de Venezia. Which you didn't get at the start of Last Vegas.
So it's another example of a trailer that completely misrepresents a film; mercifully in this case. Try as they might on their cross-country adventure, Ella and John can't outrun the reality of their situation. John suffers from extreme memory loss, Ella has an illness that I don't think anybody will be spoilt knowing is eventually revealed to be a form of cancer. They get into all the kind of scrapes that oldies do in this kind of romp – nearly crashing the van, him driving off forgetfully while she is still at the gas station, outwitting would be muggers – but they do all this while being recognisably elderly. He wets the bed and veers from being mentally coherent to not recognising his own wife within a few seconds.
Yes it's sentimental, and no doubt their lives are a breeze compared to the reality of people in this situation, but it is still devastating. There something very painful in the rapid switches between affection and contempt; that the fifty plus years of happy marriage isn't enough to stop Ella being driven crazy by his forgetfulness. You get the spoonful of sugar, but there's a lot of medicine to go down.
Italian director Virzi and co-writers have decided to set their adaptation of a novel by American author Michael Zadoorian, a best seller in Italy apparently, in 2016 and have the Trump election campaign as a backdrop. Which is disappointing. Setting films against the backdrop of an election campaign hasn't worked since Shampoo in the mid-70s, and the film's suggestion that these two represent the last remnants of 60s American optimism is heavy-handed and unnecessary.
The film's poignancy is greatly assisted by having two performers who have been famous for almost all of their adult life. When they reminisce about the old days, the glories of their youth are not abstract concepts: they are MASH and Kelly's Heroes; being dubbed the sexpot of the RSC by Parkinson and The Long Good Friday.
And they are both performers who have aged gracefully. Sutherland is in his 80s and is still a physically imposing presence, still keen enough to be able to play a ruthless despot in The Hunger Games. To see him unable to hold a thought or control his bladder is a depressing reminder of the horrors that await us all, if we're lucky.
Directed by Paolo Virzi.
Starring Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland, Janel Moloney, Christian McKay and Dick Gregory. 112 mins
Yes, it will be pronounced Lee Shure, and will be so pronounced by Helen Mirren, in a southern accent no less. There's no avoiding it. Said Lee Shure seeker is the name of an R.V that elderly married couple Ella (Mirren) and John (Sutherland) take off in to make one last road trip.
As the film started I wondered if I had gone to the wrong screening room The trailers had led me to expect a wacky old people acting outrageously and going on a zany, yet heartwarming adventure picture. The kind of film that is a little bit crazy, a little bit touching and almost entirely awful. The credits for this though listed a long, long list of Italian and European production companies and tax breaks that had clubbed together to make it, as well as noting that it had been entered in the Biennale de Venezia. Which you didn't get at the start of Last Vegas.
So it's another example of a trailer that completely misrepresents a film; mercifully in this case. Try as they might on their cross-country adventure, Ella and John can't outrun the reality of their situation. John suffers from extreme memory loss, Ella has an illness that I don't think anybody will be spoilt knowing is eventually revealed to be a form of cancer. They get into all the kind of scrapes that oldies do in this kind of romp – nearly crashing the van, him driving off forgetfully while she is still at the gas station, outwitting would be muggers – but they do all this while being recognisably elderly. He wets the bed and veers from being mentally coherent to not recognising his own wife within a few seconds.
Yes it's sentimental, and no doubt their lives are a breeze compared to the reality of people in this situation, but it is still devastating. There something very painful in the rapid switches between affection and contempt; that the fifty plus years of happy marriage isn't enough to stop Ella being driven crazy by his forgetfulness. You get the spoonful of sugar, but there's a lot of medicine to go down.
Italian director Virzi and co-writers have decided to set their adaptation of a novel by American author Michael Zadoorian, a best seller in Italy apparently, in 2016 and have the Trump election campaign as a backdrop. Which is disappointing. Setting films against the backdrop of an election campaign hasn't worked since Shampoo in the mid-70s, and the film's suggestion that these two represent the last remnants of 60s American optimism is heavy-handed and unnecessary.
The film's poignancy is greatly assisted by having two performers who have been famous for almost all of their adult life. When they reminisce about the old days, the glories of their youth are not abstract concepts: they are MASH and Kelly's Heroes; being dubbed the sexpot of the RSC by Parkinson and The Long Good Friday.
And they are both performers who have aged gracefully. Sutherland is in his 80s and is still a physically imposing presence, still keen enough to be able to play a ruthless despot in The Hunger Games. To see him unable to hold a thought or control his bladder is a depressing reminder of the horrors that await us all, if we're lucky.
