Double Bill: A Country for Old Men

I wish I’d been able to share my enthusiasm for two new movies while they were still showing in theatres (both came out early in 2019 and have long left the circuit); however, they’re now both available by other means, all the better to savour and ponder them in the comfort of your own home.

“The Old Man and the Gun”

Available on DVD.

David Lowery’s latest movie is about the real-life career criminal and escape artist Forrest Tucker, who was first imprisoned at the age of 15 (in the 1930s), and spent the rest of his life in and out of jail, having attempted 18 successful and 12 unsuccessful escapes, by his own reckoning. Tucker was profiled by David Grann for The New Yorker in 2003, and the movie is adapted from Grann’s article. Robert Redford stars as the 61-year-old Forrest in the movie, which starts in Texas in 1981, and which shows him in action robbing banks, eluding the police investigators on his trail (headed by Dallas Police Detective John Hunt, played by regular Lowery collaborator Casey Affleck), and growing warmly attached to a widow he meets named Jewel (Sissy Spacek).

The Old Man and the Gun seems tinged with nostalgia, shown in a number of its elements — the grainy, period look of the images (shot on 16-mm film); the calmly poised and friendlily animated manner of people in small-town and rural America; the presence of two elder movie stars, who recall heydays of forty, fifty years ago; and the quiet sentimentality with which Forrest regards his long career of risks and thrills. Yet Lowery’s nostalgia isn’t spread in a thick haze of treacle and tears, but is touchingly dignified, and delicately modulated into other complex and nuanced emotions and a serious sense of fun. Anyone who’s seen Lowery’s previous movies (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Pete’s Dragon, A Ghost Story) will be expecting the finely composed, richly layered images that mark each shot of this movie, as well as the concentrated performances by the actors. Here, Redford, Affleck, and Spacek achieve truly beautiful modes of grace and authenticity, that can best be described as sublime. Redford has announced that The Old Man and the Gun features his final onscreen performance, and it’s wholly apt that the role itself is one that centres on performance and charisma. Lowery’s portrait of Forrest Tucker seems elevated into a portrait of the artist Robert Redford, and the very best qualities and abilities that brought him so much admiration.

The Year in Movies – 2016

2016 was not an excellent year for this blog. It’s not because I didn’t see many movies that I loved – on the contrary, I saw some of the greatest movies of my life, and a fair volume of them – but, due to a growing number of more pressing priorities, my duties on The Back Row were neglected, and I didn’t get the chance to share those elated experiences here.

Just about everyone else on the planet has already released their round-ups of 2016, and I’ve had a look at each of the movie pundits’ choices for the top films of the year. The results have fortified my conviction that the best thing for cinematic tastes to be is unruly and uninhibited. What one first notices looking through these lists is that many films are being hailed in London and New York that we haven’t had the faintest whiff of yet in South Africa; this is just a distribution and scheduling discrepancy. But what one notices next is that, besides a few differences in ranking and an oddball choice here and there, pundits and mainstream media critics are making all the same choices for their favourite films, and those choices converge closer and closer each year. One is led to believe that many critics are just as susceptible to hype as mass audiences are, only their hype is generated at film festivals and press conferences, instead of being stoked by trailers and supplementary merchandising.

What struck me while I surveyed these consensus choices on the masses of lists and polls (which I’ve compiled for you at the bottom of this post) is that the objects of this hype so rarely align with what I would consider commendable artistic achievements. Few lists contain more than a single film that I loved, and many don’t contain even one. It’s not a huge surprise to me; I read the reviews of my favourite movies throughout the year as I saw them, and saw quite quickly that the movies in which one viewer locates rapture and daring, many others find only confusion and obscurity. What I consider the greatest film of 2016 – Terrence Malick’s Hollywood reverie Knight of Cups – was designated “rotten” on the website Rotten Tomatoes (as useless a cultural phenomenon as any website could be) with a score of 45%, and Woody Allen’s crime comedy Irrational Man scored 44%. In terms of mainstream movie releases, not many people went to see either of those two films, and not many that did loved them. This in itself doesn’t discourage me – Malick and Allen have long been working in ways that don’t rely on commercial success and critical adulation, and their careers will continue without hindrance – but it is dismaying to see how many people think a movie must be good just because of the number and stations of others who say that it is. True appreciation of the cinema, just as success in the various realms of one’s life, depends on your capacity for imagination and independence of thought.