Fonda and Tomlin have a field day in comic ‘Moving On’
“Moving On” is, first and foremost, a vehicle for Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda as sunset seniors reunited for a funeral.
But unlike their frothy, sentimental and laugh out loud teaming with Sally Field and Rita Moreno for the recent “80 for Brady,” “Moving On” seeks more solid ground in its pointed dilemmas.
This happens to be the third teaming for Tomlin with writer-director Chris Weitz (“About a Boy,” “American Pie”), several years after they jointly triumphed with “Grandma.” That was written by Weitz expressly for Tomlin who played a lesbian grandmother helping a teenager fund an abortion.
Here, Tomlin’s Evelyn is also queer, living in senior housing in California. Long after college she reunites with Fonda’s Claire at the funeral service. Evelyn drunkenly interrupts the eulogy by the dead woman’s husband (Malcolm MacDowell) which hardly matters when compared to Claire’s reaction on seeing the widower. She informs him, with total seriousness, that she’s going to murder him. This very weekend.
It would seem this movie called “Moving On” has at its center a woman who can’t move on from whatever mysterious event happened five decades ago.
While Evelyn and Claire once were college roommates, they are now wiser, a bit wary. Not only of each other but with life.
Outgoing and unpretentious if occasionally quite tart, Evelyn is lonely since her lover died years earlier. Claire attempts to enlist a reluctant, if mostly mystified, Evelyn in her murder scheme.
She strikes a lighter note when she runs into her exhusband Ralph (Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft), also a widower, and something sparks.
One serious roadblock to Murder 1: Claire is from Ohio and without a California ID or driver’s license, she can’t legally buy a gun. (Who knew?) Enter Evelyn who bribes a fellow retirement home resident (all he wants is four strips of fried bacon) for a loan of his gun.
As “Moving On” ambles along, it’s more rueful than laugh out loud funny, observational rather than jokey.
Fonda, despite the gray hair, still seems ageless while fixated on vengeance.
The men, in contrast, are resolutely one-dimensional. MacDowell, perfectly cast, can play bullying, obnoxious loudmouths in his sleep. Although he is awake if exasperated for the continued Claire confrontations over two very different versions of what happened so long ago and left Claire so emotionally damaged.
Some people, Weitz seems to be saying, won’t ever be “Moving On” — because that’s the way life is. Damage is done and a stray bullet or smothering pillow isn’t going to change that.