Today’s theme: movies about the elderly, which we rarely see. These are various portraits that show growing old doesn’t necessarily mean slowing down.
Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me…A documentary on the great actress Elaine Stritch. If you’ve ever seen her Broadway work or—more likely—as Alec Baldwin’s mother on 30 Rock, you’ll realize about what you’re in for. And that’s not a bad thing in the slightest. Grade: B
Advanced Style…A documentary about elderly women in NYC who still dress well and have aged with style. And that’s about all there is to it. The women do look amazing, but it’d be dishonest to say that they really have a lot to say about life or good advice worth listening to, and you get the sense that they’ve probably been exactly the same for a very long time. A better film might have asked if there’s a connection between resisting aging and resisting the life changes/maturity that come with it, but this just says “older women who love designer clothes are amazing and gorgeous! Period!” [And even though that’s uplifting-bordering-on-patronizing that seems to be enough for most other reviewers.] Even though some of their (tiny) apartments are over-run with (lots of) clothes that make some of the women look a little like hoarders. [If they lived in Nebraska instead of NYC, it’s hard to imagine they’d be looked at the same way.] This might be the most deliberately shallow film about old age ever made, and I know that’s the point to say that not all aging docs have to be about Alzheimer’s or death, but the film is only 72 minutes long and there’s barely enough depth here to fill that. The Elaine Stritch doc also follows a woman who refuses to equate growing old with giving up, but it still did a better job of getting beneath the surface of who she really was and expose real truths. Grade: C+
Alive Inside…Okay, so it may be kind-of a letdown to follow two documentaries about fun, rich older women with this one about Alzheimer’s patients who discover the positive effects of music, but that is the reality for more people, sadly. Even though this doc is the least depressing presentation of the material I’ve ever seen. But I found my attention drifting a lot during this, and it seems like the kind of thing that would make a great 60 Minutes feature for about ten minutes, but it becomes repetitive while stretching it into a feature. Grade: C
Burt’s Buzz…If “Advanced Style” never tried hard enough to get beneath the surface of its stylish seniors, then that goes double for this doc which focuses solely on the co-creator (and image) of the Burt’s Bees brand, but still feels like we don’t fully know what makes him tick by the end of it…even as we’ve watched him do literally everything in his daily routine. It’s hard to tell what, if anything, really drives Burt to get out of the bed in the morning except telling us he would rather be left alone…even as he lets a documentary film crew follow his every move and goes to Taiwan to represent the company he was pushed out of. Still, there’s a cozy watchability to this film, and it has a very sharp look. I can’t fully fault the creative team because I get the sense there’s just a lot of stuff Burt wouldn’t talk about, and they may have gotten the sense that this is a case of a guy who’s evasive because there’s really not much to him. Grade: C+
A Night in Old Mexico…The only scripted film of the bunch, but (in a weird way) the one that’s most truthful about old age. We get a real sense of what makes Robert Duvall’s old cowboy tick—he’s determined to have a great night in Mexico, running from old age and eventually getting mixed up with some desperadoes that want a bag of cash from a drug deal gone wrong—and the fears that are driving him. But Duvall phones it in with a performance that feels like he’s riffing on his famous Lonesome Dove character, and the coincidences keep getting more ridiculous (as do the action scenes). Still, Angie Cepeda is a discovery as a singer/topless entertainer who’s similarly run out of options. I’m a little torn on this one as I know it’s not a very good movie, but it is a strangely entertaining one. Grade: C+