The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
THE POWER OF MOVIES FOR GROWNUPS
What do the 2024 Academy Awards and AARP The Magazine’s Movies for Grownups® Awards have in common? Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, Annette Bening, Robert De Niro, Colman Domingo, Jodie Foster, Christopher Nolan and Killers of the Flower Moon. All are winners of 2024’s AARP The Magazine’s Movies for Grownups Awards and are also nominated for this year’s Academy Awards.
The Movies for Grownups (MFG) Awards have long been considered predictors of who will be nominated for Oscars. AARP’s efforts to combat ageism in Hollywood seem to increasingly prove that true. Thirty years ago, only two Oscar acting nominees were over age 50. This year, 18 of the 35 top nominations go to individuals 50 and older. In 2000, shortly before the MFG Awards began, the best actress and supporting actress winners were 25 and 24; in 2023, they were 60 and 64.
It seems an obvious concept: Who can deny the value of experience? Of his onscreen performance, Robert De Niro, this year’s MFG best supporting actor and costar of the Awards’ best picture, Killers of the Flower Moon, says: “Age helps. You have more experience. You’ve earned the right to be doing this character.”
Yet for years Hollywood seemed to gravitate nearly exclusively to the young. “So much of our industry is geared toward getting young kids into the theater, and there’s a place for that,” notes MFG best actress winner Annette Bening. “But many of us want stories that get us in our gut, that are for adults.”
Enter Movie for Grownups. The initiative began as an AARP The Magazine story in 2002, when the publication’s editors realized that their nearly 39 million readers were huge consumers of film, but that there was a dearth in Hollywood of movies made by and for grownup audiences. With the conviction that recognizing the talent of older actors and filmmakers would encourage the making of more films that resonate with older viewers, the editors launched the Awards.
First an intimate luncheon at a Los Angeles hotel, MFG soon became a not-tomiss awards gala, with a star-studded red carpet and a telecast on PBS Great Performances. As MFG has evolved — in 2021, the editors added television award categories — its mission has remained the same: “to ignite a cultural change,” says AARP CEO Jo Ann Jenkins, “to challenge Hollywood’s perspective on aging.”
While spotlighting content that features issues, storylines and performances that speak to its audience, AARP has simultaneously underscored the size and influence (not to mention the spending power) of the 50plus population. According to a fall 2023 survey by MRI-Simmons, the leading researcher into the patterns of American consumers, more than 19 million AARP members had attended a movie in a theater in the previous year. AARP’s membership also boasted a whopping total of 76.8 million subscriptions to streaming services, and 34 million members reported watching TV regularly. In short, older Americans are a force to be reckoned with at the box office — and when it comes to ratings.
Additionally, the MFG Awards shine a positive light on aging. As MFG’s 2023 career achievement winner Jamie Lee Curtis said, “I really like being a grownup. I love that we know that we’re here for something more than shiny things and Instagram likes. I love that we recognize that it’s our responsibility to do our part before we die to make the world better.”
in the resilience of closed-ended, Dick Wolf-vein procedurals that still populate much of broadcast real estate (and that have returned in earnest after the strike-based production shutdowns). Some people clearly still believe that institutions can mete out justice equitably. But just as many would rather put our fate in the hands of a tough-talking Clive Owen
(Monsieur Spade), an amusingly inscrutable Mandy Patinkin
(Death and Other Details) or even the homespun vigilantism of Juno Temple’s Fargo character.
It’s indeed notable that many of these mysteries don’t have wholly satisfying solutions, whether they require the deus ex Alfre Woodard of Monsieur Spade or the careful mediation of reality TV cat-fighting orchestrated by a bekilted Alan Cumming on Peacock’s Traitors.
HAN The solutions might not always be satisfying, but the fact that you can generally count on there to be one can be comforting. Real life is often overwhelming and confusing, with no straightforward answers. By contrast, few TV mysteries end with “anyway, we don’t actually know what happened” or “turns out there was no killer and the person just slipped and fell” — not none, but it’s rare.
One that kind of does, though?
Expats. Its kid-goes-missing premise sounds like the setup for a crime drama. But no resolution ever arrives. The Amazon series is much more concerned with how its characters deal with that uncertainty, and the grief and guilt accompanying it. And it has no answers for those questions, either; rather, the grace it extends is acknowledging that sometimes, there is no answer. You just go on because you have to.
But, it’s not like mysteries were the only genre being redirected and rebooted to fresh purpose this winter. We also got Amazon’s
Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which uses the high stakes of a spy thriller to explore the ups and downs of marriage. I found the chemistry between Donald Glover and Maya Erskine a bit lackluster, but it’s a clever premise — and a relatable one, if you’ve ever had an argument with your long-term partner that feels like life or death.
FIENBERG The more I reflect on it, the more I love Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which inverts the sizzle-to-steak ratio of Doug Liman’s 2005 film in interesting ways; it turns all the explosions, murders and missions into amusing afterthoughts within a bittersweet love story about tiny betrayals and disappointments. I totally buy Glover and Erskine’s chemistry, and the guest stars — Parker Posey, Wagner Moura, Ron Perlman, Sarah Paulson — are terrific.
I appreciated Disney+/Hulu’s
Echo along the same lines. It’s barely functional as a comic book adaptation but rather thrilling as a story about how disability and generational trauma can become their own brand of superpower.
I like the audacity of these hybrids, especially when the alternatives are limited swings like Amazon’s Reacher and
CBS’ Reacher-lite (aka Tracker); Paramount+’s Sexy Beast, which has none of what was distinctive about the film Sexy Beast; or the decent Disney+ adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which aspires only to be more like the Percy Jackson books than like the two awful movies.
Even attempts at historical drama have felt like they were trying to fit complicated things into familiar boxes. FX’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans plays more like a season of Genius, and
Nat Geo’s Genius: MLK/X plays more like a season of Feud.
Apple TV+’s The New Look can’t decide if it wants to be Feud:
Dior vs. Chanel or Genius: Every French Fashion Designer. At least Masters of the Air (also on Apple), which wants to nestle into the Band of Brothers formula, gives viewers the big-budget aerial exploits and deep on-theverge-of-stardom ensemble its trailers promised.
HAN The New Look is a great example of “trying to fit a complicated thing into a familiar box.” Its hook is that it’s a series about fashion, featuring a bunch of names you definitely recognize. But Dior’s sumptuous creations don’t amount to much more than pretty wrapping paper for what’s actually a World War II drama in which the main characters just kind of happen to be very famous designers. I think it’s quite a good version of that drama, to be clear, but I wonder if the bait-and-switch will frustrate more viewers than it entices.
Much as I’ve enjoyed watching some of these series figure out fresh ways to hook unsuspecting viewers, there’s something to be said for a show that is what it is and doesn’t worry too much about packaging. One of my faves of this year is Max’s Sort Of, a modest Canadian gem that just wrapped up its third and final season. It’s a Gen Z coming-of-age comedy but so much more distinctive than that label implies — funny when it wants to be funny, achingly poignant when it wants to be achingly poignant. It follows its nonbinary 20-something lead (Bilal Baig) through themes as big as romance, grief and family but understands that self-exploration doesn’t stop in young adulthood. FIENBERG Sort Of is charming and, in Baig, has a lead like nobody else on TV. On the subject of underthe-radar gems with strong senses of their own identity,
I’ve been telling people since December to watch Kat Sadler’s
Such Brave Girls on Hulu. It’s a genuinely funny dysfunctional family comedy with far more laughs than your usual series about depression and trauma.
Let me close by reframing my initial question: What non-detective character from the past few months of TV would you enlist to investigate your own demise? For me, it’s probably Haru from Netflix’s weirdly endearing stopmotion Pokémon Concierge. She knows how to get things done.
HAN And you laughed at me when I told you to watch Pokémon Concierge! Doesn’t seem so funny now that she’s the only thing keeping you from turning into a cold case, does it? As for me, I’ll go with Dr. Gamelli from Dr. Death, played with righteous fury by
Luke Kirby. He’s got experience already in getting to the bottom of suspicious deaths.
The real question here should probably be why you and I are making plans in the event of our sudden and violent ends. The answer is that Peak Murder TV has clearly warped our brains. Onward and upward, to the relatively peaceful pastures of … uh,
Shogun? Ripley? Maybe the season of blood isn’t over, after all.
“Feud: Capote vs. The Swans plays more like a season of Genius, and Genius: MLK/X plays more like a season of Feud.”