Review

The Old Man & the Gun

Police Detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck), shown ordering lunch with wife Maureen (Tika Sumpter), has mixed feelings about actually catching the crafty, venerable bank robber he’s chasing in The Old Man & the Gun.
Police Detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck), shown ordering lunch with wife Maureen (Tika Sumpter), has mixed feelings about actually catching the crafty, venerable bank robber he’s chasing in The Old Man & the Gun.

Toward the riotous end of David Lowery's fact-based geriatric criminal story The Old Man & the Gun, aging bank robber Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford) is sitting on a horse on the top of a hill that crests near the farmhouse of his girlfriend (Sissy Spacek). It's dusk, somewhat misty, and the composition of the shot suggests a peaceful sort of retirement for the old boy, even as it holds a certain Don Quixote quality.

Alas, a stream of squad cars, lights twirling, comes blazing down the country road, rounding their way to the house. Taking in their arrival from his elevated vantage point, Tucker, who up until this point has been vivacious and winningly incorrigible, simply hangs his head morosely in defeat.

The Old Man & the Gun

88 Cast: Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, Casey Affleck, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, John David Washington, Elisabeth Moss, Keith Carradine

Director: David Lowery

Rating: PG-13, for brief strong language

Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes

It's a strikingly poignant shot, carrying all the more weight because it is likely the last time we will see Mr. Redford on a horse in a movie again. Shortly before filming began, Redford announced somewhat matter-of-factly in an interview that this would be his swan song as an actor, wrapping up an astounding career as a quintessential Hollywood leading man for more than 50 years.

There are certain other connections that reverberate through Lowery's film, his first since last year's scintillating A Ghost Story. That film, too, was obsessed with the idea of human legacy, as a fallacy and a hopeful engagement not just with the idea of immortality, relatively speaking, but also serving as a grand purpose, something to make our lives more significant than a simple mandate for propagation and survival.

Tucker certainly knows what stirs his soul, it just happens to be illegal to pursue it. Arrested countless times -- and having escaped numerous jails, including Alcatraz -- Tucker's passion runs directly counter to standard law and order. But only to a philosophical (and financial) end: He doesn't want to hurt anybody (he rarely even takes an actual gun with him, only using the threat of one to get his way), he just wants the thrill of the heist, and the getaway, and the sense that his meticulous attention to detail and careful planning is capable of subverting the system as it stands.

His approach is calm, quiet and quite gentlemanly. He speaks respectfully to the tellers, letting them know he has no intention of hurting them or putting them in danger, but that he'll need them to fill his money sack just as quickly as they can, if you please. Using a couple of old-hand accomplices (played by Danny Glover and Tom Waits), Tucker goes on a tear, a spree that works seamlessly enough, including one gig directly in front of an off-duty detective, John Hunt (Casey Affleck), who isn't even aware of the situation until it's far too late.

Embarrassed and humiliated, Hunt puts a serious amount of heat on Tucker, before eventually connecting all the dots. In the meantime, Tucker meets Jewel (Spacek), a sober, down-to-earth sort, with whom he hits it off very well. As Hunt and his team grow ever closer to Tucker, he defiantly continues his spree, even when it's obvious where this will all end up.

The first two acts of the film are light and cheerful, echoing the buoyant mood of its protagonist, who never seems happier than in the middle of a caper. In one tremendous scene, we see the car chase that last landed him in prison some years before, as he merrily leads a squadron of police cars down a highway and circling back over barren fields, a smile wrapped on his face like a little kid on a moon bounce. But by the third act, as Hunt's pursuit is getting ever closer, Lowery's film takes a more melancholy air. All good things end, the film suggests, including legendary careers, and reconciling that becomes another primary burden of your later years.

Appropriately enough, Lowery manages to sneak in echoes from Redford's career -- a photo of him as a young man, just getting started in Hollywood; footage from some of his older films inserted in a montage of Tucker's prison escapes; that horse -- which adds the right touch of reverence as it bids him adieu.

By the end of the film, as Tucker continues on his way, Lowery's film lauds its protagonist and the man portraying him with an ambiguously open ending. It's not Butch and Sundance being spared by still-frame after charging from behind cover into what will certainly be their bullet-ridden doom, but it still gives us enough leeway to imagine a fantasy in which not all would be thus, which is a fitting way to send off one of the last true movie stars of the era.

As Ray Davies once suggested, "celluloid heroes never really die."

MovieStyle on 10/19/2018

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