SO LONG, SUNDANCE HE
Drawing a gun — and the crowds — Robert Redford has us falling for his charms one last time...
ROBERT Redford gives what he has said will be his valedictory cinematic performance in the Old Man & The Gun, before shuffling, or at least walking with the purposeful but rather stiff gait of the codger he now inescapably is, into retirement.
It appears that the great man might back- track on his plans to retire from acting. But this is the perfect movie for his swansong, if swansong it proves to be, not least because 50 years have passed, give or take, since he played his most famous title role. He was a ‘Kid’ then, albeit a moustachioed one, and he’s the titular old man now.
But not everything has changed. As in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the tool of his trade is once again a handgun, and he’s once again holding up banks.
Writer-director David Lowery’s film rather loosely tells the true story of Forrest Tucker (Redford), a lifelong villain who started robbing banks in his mid-teens and couldn’t stop. He kept being caught and convicted, and kept escaping.
In total, he escaped 18 times. We only see these prison breaks in a fleeting but jolly montage of flashbacks, enabling Lowery to use a clip of the youthful, impossibly gorgeous Redford in The Chase (1966), even before his name was gl obal s horthand f or male pulchritude.
If you’re as old as I am, you’ll remember those exchanges at bus stops and launderettes in the Seventies and well into the Eighties, before anyone had heard of George Clooney or Brad Pitt.
This is partly why the Old Man & The Gun, with its mellow jazz soundtrack, is about as sweetly elegiac as a portrait of a hardened criminal could be. It doesn’t just remember Forrest (who died, aged 83, in 2004), it r emembers Redford.
When Forrest tells his ageing girlfriend, played by Sissy Spacek, that he’s never ridden a horse in his life, we know he’s fibbing.
Quite consciously, there’s more than a touch of the Sundance Kid in this old rogue, who doesn’t need the money from all the banks he keeps (very politely) robbing, he just needs the kicks. ‘I’m not talking about making a living,’ he says. ‘I’m just talking about living.’
doesn’t do it all alone. He has a pair of similarly superannuated accomplices nicely played by Danny Glover and Tom Waits, and a dogged cop ( Casey Affleck) on his tail.
Again, the parallels with George Roy Hill’s 1969 classic are barely concealed. The trio of bank robbers are dubbed the ‘over-the-hill gang’, almost as if Butch’s hole-in-the-wall gang had stuck around until they were old and wrinkled.
And what is Forrest’s disguise, as he saunters up to unsuspecting bank managers and slowly opens his jacket to show them (but significantly, not us) his pistol? Why, a stick-on Sundance moustache, of course. The Old Man &
The Gun isn’t a thriller. It’s not really a heist movie, either, despite the number of heists. And it’s not quite a caper movie, even though there is a soft undercurrent of
The Old Man & The Gun (12A) Verdict: Whimsically engaging
comedy. It's more of a romance, both in the obvious sense, as Forrest courteously woos Spacey's character, the elegant Jewel, and in a more oblique way, in that it invites us to fall for a career crimi-nal whose gentlemanly style hardly blinds us to the terror he causes in those he charmingly threatens to shoot if they don't hand over the loot. And yet, fall we do. The story begins in 1981. During a high.-speed chase following his latest stick-up, Forrest pulls over to help a woman standing by a broken- down car. This is Jewel, who inadvertently provides him with cover as the police cars whizz past.
They take a shine to one another, and the gentle chemistry that f i zzes between Redford and Spacek throughout this movie is one of its chief delights. Lowery knows it, allowing his camera to linger on their twinkly-eyed banter for as long as he dares.
Forrest’s congenital dishonesty extends to Jewel, too. He tells her a series of lies, which she believes, and one truth — that he robs banks — that she dismisses.
She is beguiled by him, yet we don’t think of her as another of his victims, as Spacek doesn’t play her as a dupe, but as a woman of strength and substance. It’s a lovely performance.
Affleck i s wonderful, too, as detective John Hunt, who takes it as a personal affront that one of Forrest’s understated robberies took place right under his nose, yet comes to admire his quarry for the singular way he goes about his business. Bank managers and tellers keep telling him not about the old man and his gun who robbed them, but the old man and his courtly charm.
shows us a little of Hunt’s domestic life as he crafts three separate stories which occasionally converge — that of the obsessed cop, of a t wilight romance, and of the bank-robbing spree.
It’s a whimsical film, never likely to become a classic, but written and directed with tremendous lightness of touch, and enough rigour to keep it to 93 minutes.
Lowery’s most recent picture, last year’s acclaimed A Ghost Story, was similarly concise. How refreshing to find a film-maker who knows how to t el l a s t ory succinctly.
Of course, it helps to have a leading man as naturally laconic as Redford has always been.
It is no reflection on his acting ability that while Spacek and Affleck are enveloped by their characters, he and Forrest Tucker are somehow always there in tandem. The old man and the icon.
If this really is curtains, it’s a great way to take a bow.