Don’t play it again, Sam
The Stranger gets his own movie, but the leaden script kills his comeback.
The extravagantly moustachioed The Stranger, who opened and closed the Coen brothers’ eccentric masterpiece The Big Lebowski, always looked like a man who deserved a movie of his own.
Brett Haley plainly thought so: he had the actor concerned, Sam Elliott, in mind when he wrote this well-intentioned but sluggish melodrama about a man spurred by the prospect of death to embrace what’s left of his life.
Despite some handsome cinematography, the film never takes off, largely because the script, leaden when it should be light, implores, even badgers, us to like its main man.
He is Lee Hayden, a silver-screen cowboy hero reduced to voicing commercials (there are echoes of Elliott’s life here: his western credits go back to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and it’s his voice, like maple syrup poured through gravel, that says “Beef: it’s what’s for dinner” on a famous television ad).
Hayden spends most of his time smoking dope and feeling sorry for himself until he meets comedian Charlotte (Laura Prepon, a regular on Orange Is the New Black), who proves just the tonic for a man who has had a bit of bad news from the doctor.
Thirtysomething beauties get the hots for septuagenarians more often in the movies than in real life, one suspects: these two certainly have doing drugs in common, but less explicable is how she makes humiliating fun of his old body at a club after having invited him to come along.
Still, the relationship lurches towards a comforting conclusion that suggests the cure for pancreatic cancer may be reading the poems of Edna St Vincent Millay.
Elliott knows how to give a good line reading, but most of the lines are naff non sequiturs and some of the cues so slow you can take a nap while the actors are picking them up.
– Peter Calder IN CINEMAS NOW