Helen and Donald’s double act
The Leisure Seeker (15) Verdict: Not roadworthy ★★✩✩✩
HELEN MIRREN and Donald Sutherland, in their first film together for nearly 30 years, sounds like an enticing double-act.
But be warned. Mirren isn’t often miscast, yet she fails to convince in this wincingly mawkish, ‘bittersweet’ comedy, adapted from a novel of the same name, about a couple in their twilight years heading on one final road trip.
Even with shapeless clothes and a bad wig, she looks far too spry to be an old woman at death’s door, as the script intends. And while the great Dame can essay an American accent with the best of them, it was a mistake to make her a fading South Carolina belle. Her Charleston vowels fade in and out like a radio station with a dodgy signal.
Mirren and Sutherland play Ella and John Spencer, who set off from their New England home in their antiquated ‘ Leesure Seeker’, a 1975 Winnebago, without telling their two rather prissy grownup children. They’re heading for Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, Florida.
John is a long-retired English teacher now in the grip of Alzheimer’s disease. But like Ella, director Paolo Virzi doesn’t know quite how to handle his dementia, mining it for laughs
one minute, and for poignancy the next. Meanwhile, Ella is maddeningly voluble; she simply will not shut up. Nor will he as soon as he finds a waitress he thinks might want to listen to his theories about Hemingway.
Most don’t, of course, until, waddya know, he encounters one who did The Old Man And The Sea as her college dissertation.
In the spirit of all bad road-trip films, the Spencers encounter just about every conceivable misadventure. A lecture from a traffic cop, check. A few dangerous swerves, check. A hold-up by a couple of desperadoes, check.
As they proceed, John drifts in and out of lucidity, but increasingly she seems like the one with the bad memory, looking tragically pained every time he forgets his own children’s names, then beaming with adoration when he finds some sustained clarity, as if his condition keeps slipping her mind as well as his.
As all this goes on — and on, and on — we learn more and more about their long marriage, which includes one great rattling skeleton in John’s closet.
We also learn that Ella’s first boyfriend 60 or so years earlier was black. In South Carolina, in the Fifties? Really? If she was a lifelong card-carrying liberal then maybe, just maybe. But she’s fiercely Republican. Like so much else in this well-intentioned but woefully disappointing film, it doesn’t stack up.