A funny, heartbreaking and honest Alzheimer’s road movie

The Leisure Seeker 15 cert, 112 min

Dir Paolo Virzì

Starring Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland, Christian Mckay, Janel Moloney, Dick Gregory

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” croons Janis Joplin in Me and Bobby Mcgee, the song that plays over The Leisure Seeker’s closing credits. The line is such a neat summation of the film’s spirit, it should really be painted on the back bumper of the Leisure Seeker itself – the vintage motorhome that dauntlessly chugs from suburban Massachusetts to the Florida Keys with old marrieds Ella (Helen Mirren) and John Spencer (Donald Sutherland) on board, as they treat themselves to one last driving holiday together.

This first English-language film from the Italian director Paolo Virzì is an impeccably acted, teary-funny comedy about an ageing couple coming to terms with the fact that their days of living independently are numbered. John is slipping further into the fog of Alzheimer’s with every passing week, while Ella is awaiting some kind of hospital treatment, the exact nature of which is suggested by her cropped and wispy silver hair.

A Canadian and an Englishwoman, Sutherland and Mirren both bring an outsiders’ eye to a film that’s fizzily curious about the state of America right now, and that goes double for Virzì, who shoots the film like a tourist on a cross-country trip. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign speech (“It is time to show the whole world that America is back!”) intermingles with Carole King’s It’s

Too Late on a car radio, with unexpectedly bracing pathos. The film doesn’t labour its place in history, but a sense of that history ticks away throughout under the surface – such as the unspoken acknowledgements that much of the United States’ working-class bedrock is now predominantly non-white.

Sutherland’s ability to radiate dignity even as his character is losing himself in dementia is instrumental in making us ache for the younger, sharper man the film allows us to sense we once knew. With his grand white beard and tufty hair, he looks either distinguished or dishevelled depending on the angle you catch him at: he almost looks as if someone has been keeping him rolled up under the bed, like an antique rug.

Meanwhile, Mirren brilliantly shows us Ella wrestling with her heartbreaking transition from spouse to carer. Crucially, the film doesn’t just have John forget things in funny ways. It’s bluntly honest about the cruelty of his condition – the irritability, the delusions, the incontinence.

The canon of Alzheimer’s films doesn’t want for performances full of compassion and fine-grained observation. But as their faded Winnebago wends its way towards the coast, Ella and John show there’s room for two more. RC