Telluride '18: The Old Man & the Gun

½*/****
starring Robert Redford, Casey Affleck, Danny Glover, Sissy Spacek
written and directed by David Lowery

by Walter Chaw David Lowery follows up his enigmatic A Ghost Story with this slobbery, open-mouthed kiss to Robert Redford, in his alleged swan song to screen acting. Redford plays real-life bank robber Forrest Tucker, who, in a blue suit and stupid hat, resumes his long career of traumatizing tellers and imparting folksy aphorisms after escaping from San Quentin. Seeing this life as his calling, Tucker was oft-described as seeming "happy," and so that's the tactic Lowery and Redford take towards this material, presenting everything as this bucolic Americana bullshit of the variety the elderly and the elderly-at-heart, especially, get off on and which Redford has made his stock-in-trade in his dotage. The only thing missing is an early-bird buffet as patrons enter the theatre. Tom Waits and Danny Glover play Tucker's sometime-partners in crime and poor Sissy Spacek is enlisted as his gal Jewel ("Well, y'sure look it!") to deliver "good-natured" to the assembled. Yes, Redford, one of the most exceptional and brilliant actors in film history, is now delivering the patented Robert Duvall elderly performance: repeating phrases, smiling in a non-specific way, and patting people's hands as they talk, complete with a wired hearing aid dangling from his ear.

The Old Man & the Gun is a gloriously condescending film. Start with an awesomely repugnant score by Daniel Hart that paints old people as adorable woodland creatures; just the fact of them is whimsical--pure delight and they're sprightly, too. It says something not-wonderful that this is the kind of movie Redford wants to go out on. It's the morphine for the pain, not the needle. Consider, too, that there are more chryons in this film than in possibly any other movie I've seen, listing off the times and places of Tucker's aggravated felonies with forced whimsy. Not content with those, there are even title cards that punctuate the picture's HAPPY! message with coy ellipses. It's like a children's movie for old people. Someone should explain to me, too, the moment where a young mixed-race girl (Ari Elizabeth-Johnson) reads the get-well-soon card she's written the recently-shot President Reagan and thanks him, without irony, for keeping them safe. Casey Affleck is tasked with being the killjoy detective, John Hunt, who puts together a case against Tucker and the boys. He plays it straight, and he seems like he's in a different film entirely. His wife, Maureen (Tika Sumpter), is black, and one night, in 1981 in Texas, they go out to a little diner after dancing in their kitchen to Three Dog Night and nothing happens. Of all the unpleasantness The Old Man & the Gun seeks to ignore, add any trace of racism in Texas circa 1981.

The danger of films as aggressively harmless as The Old Man & the Gun is that they feed into a certain base belief system about the way things are and the illusion of how good things used to be. There are hints herein that Tucker's actions are deeply traumatizing to his victims--particularly a young mother who begs for the life of her child when Tucker decides to cleverly carjack her while eluding, again, the hapless police. There's subtext ripe for mining, too, in the idea that because the robbers are elderly, no one pays much attention to them, thus allowing them to continue getting away with their adorable terror spree. What would the film have been like if the crimes they were committing were kidnapping and murder, instead? Problematically, the audience is led to feel that bank-robbery isn't much of a big deal, either, never mind the weeping teller, or the scene where a bank is robbed while John Hunt's kids are there. All of that PTSD is played as the endearing shenanigans of an American folk hero, which is, alas, par for the course for movies that think you're an idiot. The lingering impact of the film, if there is one, is how hilarious it is that old people have sex lives, so long as I don't have to watch or really even have it intimated for a second. There is not one moment of The Old Man & the Gun that owns its uncomfortable underneath; it's like sanitizing a crocodile pit for your protection. If you really needed a glad-handing film about a cheerful sociopath living his best life to tell you that old people are three-dimensional human beings, then you're the fucking sociopath.