The road retravelled
Helen Mirren was happy to team with her old friend Donald Sutherland in The Leisure Seeker, which deals frankly with aging and death
“Get me a Canadian, hon.”
As straight-talking southerner Ella Spencer in senior road trip comedy-drama The Leisure
Seeker, Canadian Club rye on the rocks is Helen Mirren’s cocktail-hour usual. But her request could also be a casting call. Canadian actor Donald Sutherland plays Ella’s longtime husband, John, and their pairing marks an onscreen reunion for the actors.
The Leisure Seeker, opening Friday, sees Mirren (who was nominated for a Golden Globe for the role) and Sutherland team up for the first time since 1990’s Bethune: The Making of a Hero, where they also played spouses.
“The last time we worked together, I was just a mere blip on the landscape and he was a sort of towering monument,” Mirren said when she sat down with a group of reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
As always when I have spoken with her, the 71-year-old Mirren was charming and looked smashing, wearing a silky blue-and-green checked wrap dress and bright red lipstick, her white hair styled in a wispy shag.
She called Sutherland, who was given an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in November, “an extraordinary icon.”
“He’s been a big movie star for a very long time,” said Oscar-winner Mirren. “I haven’t been on his level ever probably, but certainly not until comparatively recently, compared to him.”
She praised Sutherland for his “amazing body of work,” and admitted that was intimidating when she first worked with him nearly 30 years ago. “But in fact he carries with him a great vulnerability and a great generosity,” she said, adding that they get along well; he makes her laugh and she likes to tease him.
The Leisure Seeker, named for the Spencers’ wheezing Winnebago, rides on the skills of these two accomplished actors and their palpable fondness for each other. The story centres on their characters giving their worried kids the slip to hit the road in the ancient RV for a final great adventure. The getaway is prompted by John’s worship of Ernest Hemingway and a ticking clock for both. He’s a retired English professor with advancing Alzheimer’s, so it’s now or never for the couple to visit Hemingway’s Key West home. And Ella has a secret reason for making the trip, too.
Set in the summer before the 2016 U.S. election, it’s a bittersweet and sentimental trip. But it’s not all long farewells and sadness. John is oblivious to his failing memory and his situation is often played for laughs. Mirren is delightful as the over-sharing, plain-spoken Ella.
“It’s not a subject we see a lot,” Mirren said of the senior-focused story and how it examines aging and death, marriage, memory, long-buried secrets and sex.
“Film deals in optimism and the future and happily ever after more than the end of life, except of course violent movies,” Mirren said. “But death with no consequence is not a real thing.”
She praised Italian director Paolo Virzi’s “wonderful Italian understanding, gentle comedic understanding of life that doesn’t veer way from the absolute realities” with his first English-language film.
“It’s a simple, human story. Couldn’t be more ordinary, really,” she said. “Talk about ordinary people. It’s the ultimate ordinary-people film. You can stop anybody on the street and say, ‘Tell me about your grandmother or your parents. Or you,’ so it’s a process that we will all go through, as the night follows day.”
Mirren said making The Leisure Seeker was actually like going on a road trip with Sutherland. They spent hours driving what she called the “Winnie-willgo.” It was just as temperamental as it was onscreen, Mirren said, miming Sutherland’s struggles with the steering wheel.
“The brakes were really bad. The gears were really bad and it wouldn’t go up hills at all, and going down hills was quite scary because the brakes weren’t working,” Mirren said brightly. “It was quite a hair-raising experience.”