One good heist movie deserves another: The Old Man & the Gun.
Review, B4
You want to know what a laid-back heist movie is The Old Man & the Gun? When the bank robber, with maybe no more than a few thousand dollars in his satchel, is engaged in a high-speed chase with police, the soundtrack breaks into Jackson C. Frank’s 1965 folk tune Blues Run the Game. It’s a minor score for a minor score.
The robber is Forrest Tucker, played by Robert Redford; 82 years old, and the camera still loves him, and the feeling is clearly mutual — I think reports of his retirement have been greatly exaggerated. Forrest was a real bank robber, and writer/ director David Lowery’s account opens with a sly disclaimer: “This story, also, is mostly true.”
It’s also a reference to Redford’s role as a wild-west train robber in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which turns 50 next year. A decade younger than his costar Paul Newman, Redford played the kid in that movie, which began: “Most of what follows is true.” (It also included some offbeat musical choices; who’d have thought Burt Bacharach wrote Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head for a western?)
Despite the disclaimer, The Old Man & the Gun starts very specifically, at 10:02 on the morning of Sunday, July 26, 1981, with Forrest walking into a Texas bank and emerging, a few minutes later, with a bag of cash. His modus operandi was simple — flash the gun, be polite, stay calm. Swapping his hot car for a cool one, he then pulls over on the highway to help a stranded motorist, played by Sissy Spacek.
I THINK THE STAR WAS JUST CASING THE JOINT.
You can see his face light up when she tells him her broken-down truck is also stolen — has the bank robber met a car thief ? — but she’s only fooling. Over a friendly coffee he tells her what he does for a living; naturally, she doesn’t believe him. The two fibbers hit it off nicely.
The Old Man & the Gun is Lowery’s follow-up to his breakout 2017 hit A Ghost Story, which starred Casey Affleck under a white sheet, and was not in the least bit a horror movie; it was actually a ghost’s story. Affleck returns in this one as John Hunt, a Texas police officer who sets his sights on Forrest and his elderly accomplices (Danny Glover, Tom Waits), dubbed the Over-the-Hill Gang.
Officer Hunt — that’s his real name, by the way — is inspired to take down Forrest after being inadvertently (and unknowingly) in one of the banks as it’s being quietly robbed. But eyewitnesses are little help; most people just remember that the guy was gentlemanly, debonair and wore a hat. And the movie suggests that Hunt was more interested in the chase than the capture.
That might be because Forrest was a difficult man to keep in one place, even in jail. In a brief montage that makes some clever use of old footage of its star, The Old Man & the Gun informs us that Forrest was also a master escape artist, feigning injuries, hiding in laundry baskets and under vehicles, and once famously sailing away from San Quentin in a homemade (well, prisonmade) boat.
Lowery’s screenplay is loosely based on a 2003 New Yorker article by David Grann that mentioned that Forrest wanted to see a movie made about his life. “When I die, no one will remember me,” he told Grann, his voice almost a whisper. Redford bought the rights at the time. Why such a long wait for the film? I think the star was just casing the joint, making sure the production went off without a hitch. And if this does turn out to be that one last job before he retires, I can’t think of a more appropriate subject. ★★★★