David Lowery’s ‘Gun’ too good to be true
David Lowery’s new film, “The Old Man & the Gun,” tells the story of an aging bank robber and a young detective trying to catch him.
Robert Redford plays the crook, named Forrest. Casey Affleck is the lawman, named Hunt, whose quarry proves persistently elusive. The characters’ names are almost too perfect for the story, yet they were gifted to the filmmaker from the true story of a committed recidivist.
“It was too good to be true, right?” Lowery says, laughing. “You think you have complete control over the environment in telling a story. But sometimes things just break your way.”
The adage about luck occurring when preparation meets opportunity comes to mind because Lowery makes films with a meticulous sense of detail; with
carefully calibrated contrasts between silence and sound; characters whose gently changing expressions often carry more information than pages of written words could; palettes that find worlds of variegation within just a few colors.
The visual precision in Lowery’s films often pairs with more vaporous themes, as his body of work thus far represents one man’s efforts to present precisely realized stories about big philosophical questions to which there are no answers.“The Old Man & the Gun,” which opens Friday, is the fifth feature in an already distinguished body of work by a 37-year-old auteur. The film again finds Lowery toggling between heavy and lighter tones from movie to movie. His previous film, “A Ghost Story,” is about as heavy a film as has been made about a weightless entity. Before that, he made a 21st-century version of the family film “Pete’s Dragon.”
Though “The Old Man & the Gun,” true to its title, involves a fair bit of gunplay, the film’s voice is rather playful at times. Lowery based it on David Grann’s 2003 New Yorker article about Forrest Tucker, a septuagenarian whose calling in life was to rob banks. If he had a secondary gift, it was escaping incarceration, most famously a break from California’s San Quentin State Prison in 1979.
That time stamp is pressed into Lowery’s film, as he clearly revels in the cars, suits and facial hair of the late 1970s. And by casting Redford and Sissy Spacek as two not-quite-star-crossed lovers, he expresses his affinity for works from that era by Terrence Malick as well as old Redford films “The Chase” and “The Sting.”
A more recent influence also surfaces, another Texas director with an exacting sense of detail. Watching Redford’s crook in “The Old Man & the Gun,” I thought of a line from Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore,” whose central private school student Max Fischer is asked about his secret to life: “I guess you’ve just gotta find something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life,” he replies. “For me, it’s going to Rushmore.”
Forrest Tucker’s Rushmore was robbing banks.
“To be honest, I thought about ‘Rushmore’ a lot while making the film,” Lowery says. “It’s one of my favorite movies, stylistically and thematically.”
Lowery’s Rushmore is cinema, which he began to follow as a student at Irving High School in the Dallas area. He made his first film at 19 and set about creating a cinema scene in Dallas rather than relocating to Austin. “St. Nick,” a story of two runaways, was released in 2009 and drew some interest. His next film, “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” was a deep piece on love and connection disguised as a cops-andcrooks film. Playful as it was, even his “Pete’s Dragon” was infused with thoughts and anxieties about the fleeting nature of youth. “A Ghost Story,” released last year, was a deep meditation on time, which Lowery condensed and collapsed to such a small personal unit before the concept exploded outward again.
Naturally, he sought a different tone for his next film. “There does seem to be this through-line with my films,” he acknowledges. “Part of it is moving away from comfort zones about what I’ve done most recently. ‘A Ghost Story’ and this film are kind of conjoined in my mind, even though they’re very different. So it’s a constant conversation with myself.”
Not unlike Tucker, who feels a pull toward commitment on one hand and a pull toward, well, robbing the next bank on the other.
“There’s no way to escape who we are,” Lowery says. “I think that comes through in the movie.”
But “The Old Man & the Gun” suggests that who we are can be a push-pull process that doesn’t halt with young adulthood. Hunt has a young family and a sense of upward movement in his work. Tucker has no familial tether and operates almost from what one might call his “nature.”
Lowery undercuts decades of cinematic confrontation between two tough guys in “Gun.”
“There was a tension, but there’s also this begrudging admiration, as well as this sense of Hunt being starstruck in a way,” Lowery says. “What is it like meeting a movie star face to face? In a way, we all know some version of that experience. It also reminded me of meeting Redford the first time.”
Playful cat-and-mouse moments abound, but the film’s quieter moments draw a little from “A Ghost Story”: Does there come a point at which one outgrows his or her nature and/or nurture? The accrued knowledge from one’s life can prompt reflection, but can it initiate change?
And can a person be “good” when his sole purpose appears to be the peaceful theft of currency from an institution?
Something about the presentation of this cop-and-robber story feels strangely hopeful during times full of conflict.
“I’m hopeful people see the sweetness in the film,” Lowery says. “I feel like that’s part of what I try to do: to be a nice person. I still take great solace in the intrinsic goodness in humanity. It’s not always the case. There are times goodness runs out. But I like the idea that people can disagree yet still find goodness in those around them.”