The Leisure Seeker
The Leisure Seeker, the first English-language feature from Italian director Paolo Virzi, is about escape, specifically about an older couple — promisingly inhabited by Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland — who light out for the territory in a 1975 Winnebago (the title vessel) without telling anyone, especially their grown children, about their plans.
As you might expect, they have things they are running from. It’s 2016, and Donald Trump’s campaign is gaining momentum. Ella (Mirren in a wig that somehow makes her look like Shirley MacLaine) has been diagnosed with terminal cancer; retired literature professor John (Sutherland) is slipping into dementia. The impulse to bolt is strong, and presumably they have nothing to lose. And so they go, leaving their home in Wellesley, Mass., to visit Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West.
Despite the reliability of these
actors, there’s not much fun to be had in the first half of the film, which establishes Ella and John as complementary pieces given to affectionate bickering and leans a little too heavily on their easy chemistry with one another. (They played a married couple once before, in 1990’s under-seen fact-based drama Bethune: The Making of a Hero, about a Canadian doctor and communist who effectively introduced modern medical practices to China in the late 1930s.) This is a film that trades on geriatric cliches spun in a quirky direction (little old ladies on motorcycles, the inflammation of sexual jealousy in an old man who sometimes can’t recognize his wife, etc.)
While their children may infantilize Ella and John, the actors who play the roles never do. They find ways to make you believe in their 40-year relationship.
Unfortunately, Mirren and Sutherland just aren’t enough, and this tonally uneven movie limps toward what seems an inevitable conclusion. John, a lifelong Democrat, gets caught up in a Trump rally and ends up mouthing slogans antithetical to his core beliefs, while another scene with Hillary Clinton supporters seems to exist simply for balance. But these sequences only situate the film in a specific place and time while saying nothing about the country through which Ella and John are traveling.
The Leisure Seeker is not particular satisfying or entertaining. It recovers a bit in its final scenes, and breaks off with a challenging, poignant scene that might even be classified as brave. But arriving here hardly seems worth the time or effort.