aging

The Savages

by James McNally on July 28, 2008 · 1 comment

in DVD

The Savages

The Savages (2007, Director: Tamara Jenkins): Described by at least one critic as a “coming-of-middle-age” film, Tamara Jenkins’ quietly powerful film covers some ground familiar to many of us entering (or enduring) our forties. John Savage (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his sister Wendy (Laura Linney) are both unmar­ried, child­less, and absorbed in their own lives. He’s a pro­fessor in Buffalo, she’s a strug­gling play­wright in New York. They’re not par­tic­u­larly close, until Wendy receives the sort of phone call that we all dread. Something’s wrong with their father, and they’ll have to put him into a nursing home. In the best of fam­ilies, this would be a night­mare, but Wendy and John didn’t grow up in the best of fam­ilies. It’s never made explicit, but it’s clear that their father was absent at best and abusive at worst, and they haven’t kept in touch in many years. Their mother is also out of the pic­ture, and it’s heart­breaking to see these two trying to deal with a man neither of them knows very well.

Wendy exhibits the guilt you’d expect of a daughter who hasn’t kept in touch. She over­com­pensates, trying to get father Lenny (Philip Bosco) into the “best” nursing home pos­sible, even as it’s clear his dementia renders him incap­able of grasping his situ­ation. John is more stoic, but his anger sim­mers until an explosive con­front­a­tion with Wendy in a nursing home parking lot. These sib­lings, neither of whom has really settled into adult­hood, are forced to con­front the fact that their father is dying. Worse, he’s beyond the point where they’ll ever get to know him or the reasons behind his mis­treat­ment of them. I appre­ci­ated this aspect of the story, that Jenkins didn’t try to make this episode the venue for a too-pat “recon­cili­ation.” John and Wendy remain angry and con­flicted about this man, but they do their best, and in the end, the ordeal allows them to move on a little fur­ther into adulthood.

Both Linney and Hoffman are superb, and while the sub­ject matter sounds unbear­ably grim, there are many moments of wel­come humour and human con­nec­tion. Although the dir­ec­tion is for the most part under­stated, I espe­cially appre­ci­ated some of the cine­ma­to­graphy near the begin­ning of the film, when these East Coast intel­lec­tuals must retrieve their father from the garish and bizarre retire­ment com­munity of Sun City, Arizona.

Official site of the film

Purchase the DVD from Amazon.com
Purchase the DVD from Amazon.ca

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: aging, fathers-and-sons

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Young@Heart

by James McNally on April 3, 2008 · 1 comment

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

Young@Heart
Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly doc­u­mentary screening pro­gramme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audi­ences in Toronto (and now Calgary and Vancouver!) their reg­ular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs fest­ival itself.
Editor’s Note: The fol­lowing review con­tains what some may con­sider a SPOILER. To avoid affecting the filmgoing exper­i­ence for you, gentle reader, I’ve applied white text col­ouring to the spoiler sec­tion. If you want to read it, just click and drag your mouse over the blank area. For those reading the RSS feed, you’ll just have to avoid reading this entry before you’ve seen the film.

Young@Heart (2007, Director: Stephen Walker): It would be almost impossible to make a bad film about the Young@Heart Chorus, a group of senior cit­izens in Northampton, Massachusetts whose rep­er­toire includes songs by The Ramones, The Clash, Coldplay and Sonic Youth. Stephen Walker’s film is a genuine crowd-pleaser, with scenes of great emo­tional intensity and some unfor­get­table char­ac­ters, and was a great choice to close out this season of Doc Soup. When musical dir­ector Bob Cilman began working with the group in 1982, their rep­er­toire was mostly vaudeville stuff, but over the years he’s added more and more con­tem­porary music. Though choir mem­bers aren’t often familiar with the songs and in many cases, don’t even like them, by the time they’ve learned them, they end up bringing some­thing unique to their inter­pret­a­tions. One of the clever touches of Walker’s film is the inser­tion of sev­eral “videos” shot for songs like the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” and the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.”

Apart from the videos (shot at Cilman’s insist­ence because he said he never saw old people in music videos), the rest of the film fol­lows a tried-and-true format, fol­lowing the choir through sev­eral weeks of rehearsals before a new show. We get to see the pro­cess of learning new material, and it often goes hil­ari­ously wrong. Some of the choir mem­bers are a bit deaf, or need large-print ver­sions of the lyric sheets. Others can’t figure out how to play com­pact discs. And some just don’t seem very musical at all. But as Walker’s camera fol­lows them around, we get to know them, and we realize how much this cre­ative outlet means to them.

One of Cilman’s ini­ti­at­ives for the new show is to bring back two mem­bers who’d recently had to stop per­forming due to health prob­lems and have them sing a duet of the Coldplay song “Fix You.” But things take an unex­pected (or per­haps only a half-expected) turn when one of them dies, and by the time Fred Knittle sits down on a chair holding his oxygen tank to sing it alone, the lump in my throat was growing. Though his voice is strong and the rendi­tion beau­tiful, it was the off-kilter beat provided by the oxygen machine that made the song so heart­breaking. That and the lyrics:
And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose some­thing you can’t replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

Mortality is the one thing that none of us can “fix” and I’m glad the film reminded us of that. This is some­thing that senior cit­izens face every day, as they watch their friends and loved ones pass on around them, and wonder when their time will come. Their courage and accept­ance in the face of such tragedy, their determ­in­a­tion to live every moment, and their simple joy in per­forming were inspiring and infectious.

If I have any com­plaints about the film, they have nothing to do with the story. But I did feel that Walker was a little too present in the film, from his intrusive nar­ra­tion to his insist­ence on talking off-camera to his on-camera sub­jects. I really enjoyed meeting these fas­cin­ating people and watching how the show is pro­duced and rehearsed, but I didn’t enjoy hearing so much about Stephen Walker, though I’m sure he’s a nice chap.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Stephen Walker along with Bob Cilman and some of the choir mem­bers from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 18:25

Official Site

Official Site for the Young@Heart Chorus

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: aging, music

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Bob and Jack’s 52-Year Adventure

by James McNally on May 14, 2007

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Inside Out

Bob and Jack's 52-Year Adventure

Bob and Jack’s 52-Year Adventure (Director: Stu Maddux, USA, 2006): Bob Claunch and Jack Reavley met in the early 1950s when both were sta­tioned with the army in Germany. This charming film charts the course of their love affair over the next half-century and beyond. Despite the rather unima­gin­ative title, the film deftly weaves together archival photos, audio record­ings (both men worked for Armed Forces Radio and later bought a radio sta­tion together) and present-day inter­views to tell a remark­ably con­ven­tional love story that, because it involves two men, makes it all the more remarkable.

I liked the way dir­ector Maddux filmed the inter­views with one man closer to the camera, allowing us to cap­ture each man’s facial expres­sions when reacting to the other’s com­ments. Just like all old mar­ried couples, these guys finish each other’s sen­tences; that is, when they’re not inter­rupting each other.

With all the debate over whether gay mar­riage should be “allowed,” it’s helpful to see that it’s really existed all along.

Official site for the film

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: aging, Documentaries, homosexuality, Inside Out, marriage

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Driven By Dreams (À force de rêves)

by James McNally on April 27, 2007

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Driven By Dreams (À force de rêves)

Driven By Dreams (À force de rêves) (Director: Serge Giguère, Canada, 2006): This film recently won Quebec’s top film honour, the Jutra award, for best feature-length doc­u­mentary. It’s a gently-told cinema verite account of five eld­erly people, ran­ging in age from 74 to 92, as they con­tinue to live their lives to the fullest. They paint, they make music, they fly radio con­trol air­planes, and they talk about dying. It’s a quiet film, set mostly in rural Quebec, and it takes its time with its sub­jects, but mixed in with the con­tem­pla­tion is a healthy dose of humour.

We exper­i­ence with these unique and lov­able indi­viduals the pain of losing a spouse, or being forced out of your home, or the small indig­nities that go with aging. This is the sort of film that was really made in the editing, and although the fin­ished film feels seam­less, the editing pro­cess took quite a while. As well, the film was helped immeas­ur­ably by the soundtrack, which fea­tured a big band com­posed of seniors, and which appears at various points in the film.

This film touched on some of the same issues as The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun, but without (for me) the same emo­tional power.

Here is the Q&A with pro­ducer Sylvie Van Brabant from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 11:48

7/10(7/10)

UPDATE: The film was awarded the Special Jury Prize Canadian Feature Documentary at the Hot Docs Awards cere­mony held on April 27. Congratulations to dir­ector Serge Giguère and everyone involved in the film.

Tagged as: #hotdocs07, aging, canada, quebec

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Next Entries →