Michael Caine’s in his prime,
THE most intriguing cast of the year — and maybe last year and next year, too — teams Michael Caine with Harvey Keitel, Jane Fonda, Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano and, fleetingly but uproariously playing herself as an oversexed marriage wrecker, the singer Paloma Faith.
But what a peculiar film it is, with all the promise of a marvellous opening giving way to a jumble of ideas, some of which work beautifully, while others limply misfire. The last picture by Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino was 2013’s The Great Beauty, which was strange but brilliant, and bagged him an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Youth, just his second film in English, has some moments of brilliance, but is mostly plain strange, a melancholic meditation on old age set in a Swiss sanatorium.
There, Caine’s distinguished retired composer, Fred Ballinger, is holidaying with his old friend, film director Mick Boyle (Keitel, oddly stilted), whose son is married to Ballinger’s daughter (Rachel Weisz). Fellow guests include enigmatic movie star Jimmy Tree (Dano unveiling his inner Johnny Depp), the obese ex-footballer Diego Maradona (not, alas, played by himself), and the newly crowned Miss Universe. I told you it was strange.
But, as I say, the opening is a delight, as Ballinger bats away the entreaties of a royal emissary ( hilariously played by Alex Macqueen), who has come to plead with him on the Queen’s behalf to conduct a concert she is giving for Prince Philip’s birthday. Much later, in another tour de force of acting, Boyle is visited by an old diva of an actress ( Fonda, spectacularly
sending up old divas everywhere), who has come to tell him why she won’t be in his next film.
Around and between these treats, however, Youth is a bizarrely disjointed affair, never less than visually stylish but quite often less than comprehensible.
Still, as an old man reflecting on a lifetime of missed opportunities, Caine is terrific. THE mind-bogglingly awful
Dirty Grandpa offers a very different meditation on old age, as Robert De Niro’s character, unamusingly called Dick, sets off to Florida along with his buttoned- up grandson Jason (played by Zac Efron), intent on showing the boy how life should be lived to the full. Which means no room for Jason’s controlling fiancee, but far, far too much room for crass jokes about sex and drugs. The director is Englishman Dan Mazer, who co-wrote the Borat movie. That was outrageous, too, but inventively and often hilariously so. There’s nothing inventive or hilarious about this film, in which the tone is set by the ghastly spectacle of De Niro’s character pleasuring himself.
It’s not that the great man can’t play comedy, but he certainly seems to have lost his powers of discernment. It can only have been the cheque, not any artistic impulse, that made him take this role. Whatever, it makes The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull all suddenly seem like a long time ago and far away.