Weak-Sauce Wallow 'The Leisure Seeker' With Donald Sutherland And Helen Mirren [San Sebastian Review]

It’s an iron-clad, scientifically proven and peer-reviewed fact that the three most irritating devices to plague the movie portrayal of senior citizens are: old lady rapping, old lady cussing and old-lady-on-a-motorbike. According to this matrix, Italian director Paolo Virzi‘s English-language debut that played, amazingly enough, In Competition in Venice and now trundles into San Sebastian belching diesel fumes and mawkishness, challenges Meat Loaf‘s dictum that two out of three ain’t bad: While we can be thankful for the small mercy that nobody actually raps, the other two motifs do occur and it’s quite bad indeed.

The stalwart international duo of Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland topline this late-life road-trip dramedy, based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Michael Zadoorian, playing Ella and John, a long-married couple who embark on one last epic fling in the eponymous RV, a huge, antiquated bus of a thing that will wheeze them asthmatically from Wellesley, Mass to the Florida Keys. In so doing, it will help them evade the well-meaning clutches of their colorless grown-up children, the fussbudget Will (Christian McKay) about whom the most interesting thing anyone can say is that he “might be gay,” and the more chill yet equally bland Jane (Janel Moloney). Maybe these fat-free Philadelphia cream cheese children are what you get when you beat the odds and manage to remain passionately in love with your spouse for decades. As Jane says, palely “They were so in love there was no time for us.”

The Leisure SeekerIll health is threatening to overtake both of them — Ella suffers spells of sickness, wears a wig and is dodging a hospital appointment; John is in the middle stages of Alzheimers and only fully cognisant of where he is about half the time. So Ella has decided that John, an English professor fond of lecturing roadside diner waitresses on the finer points of “The Old Man and The Sea” should finally get around to visiting the Hemingway house in Key West. Along the way their pandering hi-jinks run the gamut from wacky, as Ella fends off would-be muggers and accepts lifts from friendly bikers, to zany as John wanders into a Trump rally crowd and enjoys how happy everyone is. But mostly, they’re stuck firmly in the idling gear of “bittersweet” as John’s flashes of awareness become fewer and farther between, and his bouts of forgetfulness, incontinence and childish frustration more frequent.

Sutherland is good value, but his performance feels pre-engineered for overpraise simply because of his éminence grise status in Hollywood. Certainly, after the spiky brilliance of his illustrious career, the role of John, which requires him mostly just to show up and look either silvery-leonine majestic or silvery-leonine confused is surely not a huge challenge for him. But his part is better (or perhaps simply less) written than Mirren’s: her Ella is saddled with affectations of manner and dress that never fully convince, and it makes would-be touching moments, such as the slide show of memories she puts on nightly to remind John of who they are and who he is, ring just as false as her awkward Carolina drawl.

The Leisure SeekerOn a craft level, everything’s fine — Luca Bigazzi‘s cinematography is fine, the pacing is fine, the soundtrack selection, mostly classic folk songs and 70s disco, is obvious but fine. But it’s not fine that this sort of condescending pablum is judged good enough for gray-dollar audience at which it’s so clearly aimed, as if they’d be incapable of understanding anything but the most obvious and signposted of emotional beats. It has a curious lack of interest in the world it’s ostensibly exploring: aside from a pointed early music cue and the Trump rally moment (about which no real comment is made) it seems willfully apolitical. When the gas station they’ve used in the past turns out to now be run by Syrian immigrants, the encounter is played as yet more evidence of Ella’s daffy sweetness. “You’re from Syria? Oh how interesting!” she witters, subsequently displaying zero interest in them, except that, presumably in gratitude for her not immediately assuming they’re members of ISIS, they obliging search out a cake she remembers liking from the storeroom.

“The Leisure Seeker” contends with big issues: mortality, illness, infirmity, and the heartbreaking series of small deaths that is the loss of one’s memories to the ravages of senile dementia. But it does so in a cheaply manipulative manner that ranges from tin-eared, as in a revelation about Ella’s old boyfriend that plays out as a completely unbelievable and mildly racist gotcha!, to the irritatingly effective, as in the film’s tearjerking climax that is so well played by both actors that it manufactures all the sentiment the film fails to earn elsewhere. Yes, “The Leisure Seeker” might not be much good, but if you’re an easy crier it will probably make you cry, and then make you immediately annoyed at yourself for doing so.

There’s a school of thought that suggests we should celebrate any old pap that centralizes the senior-citizen experience and provides veteran acting icons with protagonist roles, and it’s true they are in short supply. But how about we honor these legendary actors, not to mention our parents and grandparents who will show up to watch them, by presupposing that their long life experience has made them more, not less, able to deal with life’s complexities, and serving up something better, richer and more truthful than “The Leisure Seeker,” which couldn’t have less bite if its teeth were in a glass on the nightstand. [C]