I Care A Lot . . . About Seniors in the Movies

As a woman of a certain age, I’m starting to become sensitive to the way older folks are portrayed on screen. I’m annoyed when ageing baby boomers are depicted as “cute,” or (worse yet) pathetically out of touch. I appreciate the fact that Liam Neeson, at 68, regularly kicks butt in his flicks. And I love the on-screen moral and intellectual strength shown by such actresses as 75-year-old Helen Mirren, 71-year-old Meryl Streep, and 86-year-old Judi Dench. 

 Which leaves me of two minds about a new movie on Netflix, I Care A Lot. The film is intended as a thrill ride, in which viewers are never quite certain on which side to be, and in that respect (despite some pretty large plot-holes) it certainly measures up. One curious thing: both writer/director J Blakeson and star Rosamund Pike are British, so I’m not quite sure why the setting of the story and the nationality of its cold-as-ice main character are made distinctly American. Is it a Brit’s comment on American naïveté, or the depths of American chicanery? Or is the film showcasing, perhaps, the failure of American social institutions to protect themselves against unscrupulous con artists?

 In any case, the opening of the film will strike fear in the heart of anyone old enough to qualify for an over-65 COVID vaccine. It seems that Pike’s character, the attractive and well-kempt Marla Grayson, knows just how to find seniors with money and no intrusive family connections. With the help of an unprincipled doctor, a blindsided judge, and several others in on the scheme, she proclaims a medical emergency, gets herself appointed her target’s legal guardian, and has the victim hustled off to a “convalescent home.” While her numerous charges waste away behind locked doors, plied into compliance with heavy-duty meds, she sells their houses and empties their safe deposit boxes, all in the name of providing funds for their ongoing medical care.

 The drama heightens, of course, when she picks the wrong victim, Jennifer Peterson (played by the always appealing Dianne Wiest). Jennifer is by no means helpless—she’s a successful businesswoman in her early seventies who owns a charming home and has a full slate of activities—but within minutes Marla has presented an emergency court order and whisked her off to a facility that quickly relieves her of her cellphone and other ties to the outside world. She seems beyond help. But wait! Jennifer has a secret personal connection that will not tolerate her disappearance, and has the muscle to do something about it.

 From there the story twists and turns, reveling in lurid dramatic clichés. Maniacal lesbians! Blood-thirsty members of the Russian mafia! Peter Dinklage throwing giant-sized temper tantrums! Several important characters get left for dead, but recover completely (this is definitely a gang that can’t shoot straight). I didn’t buy a lot of it, but there’s no question this story is entertaining, if you like mayhem and deceit. Particularly strong is what happens between Marla and her #1 foe, who bury the hatchet in a way that I didn’t see coming.

 And yet . . . I deplore watching Dianne Wiest in the role of an ageing but still vigorous woman who needs to be rescued by men. Aren’t we long past The Perils of Pauline? It’s progressive, I guess, to show a woman who’s capable of being a kingpin and a villain, but why can’t another woman—an older woman—be the one to trip her up? Maybe it’s just me, but wouldn’t it be nice to see a thriller in which a seventy-year-old female kicks butt?

 

Geriatric Derring-Do: Liam Neeson as “The Commuter”

Old people, we’re told, don’t have much social value. Because the COVID-19 pandemic seems to particularly target elders 65 and older, there are those—impatient to return to post-quarantine life—who feel oldsters should be willing to self-sacrifice so that the economy can resume its normal function. Maybe it makes sense that, as in Midsommar, the elderly should gladly give up their lives for the sake of the social organism. But I’m not convinced senior citizens are so easily expendable. Exhibit A: Liam Neeson.

Neeson was 65 when he made The Commuter in 2018. This was hardly the first action movie in which he revealed a talent for geriatric derring-do. Though his star-making role in Schindler’s List  hardly qualified him as an action hero, he has specialized (particularly since Taken in 2008) in playing tough-minded good guys who belie their age by springing into action when the chips are down. On planes, trains, and automobiles, he’s done what a man has to do, saving his family (not to mention humanity in general) by taking down baddies by any means necessary.

A commuter train out of New York City is the basic locale for most of The Commuter. As Neeson’s Michael McCauley heads for home after a particularly bad day at the office, all hell seems to break loose, to the extent that we housebound folk might suddenly feel ourselves lucky to be living in quarantine. On the train with him are an assassin, a corpse, a damsel in distress, some innocent bystanders (or are they?), a satchel full of money, and a mysterious femme fatale (Vera Farmiga) who appears to be behind the whole thing. There’s also the inevitable buddy who turns out to be Not What He Seems. McCauley, though baffled by what’s going on, quickly springs into action, using every ounce of his physical agility and his mental smarts to figure out the right course of action This includes crawling underneath the train carriage at one point and finding a way to de-couple the last car at another. (Props here to the stuntmen: it certainly all looks real, and tremendously scary.)

To be honest,  I couldn’t explain the film’s convoluted plot if I tried. But that hardly matters. The sole purpose of a movie like this one is to rev up the viewer’s adrenaline. It’s a classier, more star-driven version of what we aimed for when I was the story editor for Roger Corman at Concorde-New Horizons. making flicks whose sole purpose was to provide excitement. (Corman generally upped the ante by finding a way to sneak in some T&A, but all the blood and gore here is strictly PG-13.).

Though Neeson has had some more complex roles over the years (for instance, he played sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in 2004), there’s evidence his spate of action films has been good to him. As he approaches age 70, he seems to be taking on multiple roles every year. IMDB tells me he currently has three films in post-production, two in pre-production, and one supposedly filming, though of course the current pandemic has had something to say about that.  And he’s just signed to play the role of Philip Marlowe in a new take on Raymond Chandler’s classic detective hero.

It bears noticing that our current presidential candidates of both parties are septuagenarians. We can certainly argue about the wisdom of entrusting our ship of state to someone of advanced years. But if a seventy-year-old can be elected President of the United States, there’s no reason we can’t be treated to a septuagenarian who really kicks butt.

Up in the Air at the Movies

The other night I watched Non-Stop, a 2014 Liam Neeson thriller set aboard a transatlantic flight to London. Moviegoers have flown the unfriendly skies at least since 1954, when washed-up pilot John Wayne fought to save a planeful of passengers in The High and the Mighty. In today’s increasingly precarious world, engine trouble is the least of our worries. Neeson stars as a (yup!) washed-up sky marshal who must fight to save a planeful of passengers from an extortionist who threatens, via text message, to start killing people unless $150 million is deposited into his bank account. And then the mysterious deaths begin.

It’s all very complicated, and more than slightly implausible. But that didn’t stop me from being on the edge of my seat, trying to figure out who aboard the plane – the female lead? the guy with the shaven head?  the devout Muslim? the little girl? -- was sending those ominous texts. At the film’s end, after many high-flying emotions, I was very glad to be back on solid ground.

Let’s face it: when it comes to suspense, airplanes and movies just seem to go together. That’s what I was thinking recently when I toured the Museum of Flying, located on the grounds of the Santa Monica Airport. This being Southern California, the museum features aircraft that had co-starring roles in several Hollywood films. Like the sleek little BD-5 micro jet piloted by Roger Moore as James Bond in Octopussy. And the replica of the Wright Brothers’ original Flyer that appeared in Night at the Museum.

In tracing the history of Southern California aviation, the Museum of Flying of course devotes space to a flyboy who went on to make movies of his own. Howard Hughes—inventor, engineer, airline owner, aerospace honcho—also made his mark on Hollywood. In 1930, he produced and co-directed one of his most successful films, Hell’s Angels. This was a rough-and-tumble story of World War I combat pilots, and its aerial dogfight sequences won particular praise. Over seventy years later, Martin Scorsese focused on Hughes’ all-consuming passion for flying in his 2004 biopic, The Aviator.

I also learned the story of Douglas Aircraft, which once occupied the land where the museum now sits. During World War II, the Douglas aircraft plant turned out 300,000 planes for military use. This was such a fantastically large figure that Hitler himself deemed it mere propaganda. But the totals were genuine, thanks to round-the-clock shifts by a legion of dedicated workers, many of them Rosie the Riveters. Yes, at the height of the war, a full 40% of the Douglas workforce was female. 

Following Pearl Harbor, company founder Donald Douglas worried that his workplace, located only three miles from the Pacific Ocean, might be vulnerable to Japanese air attack. And so began a little-known collaboration between Hollywood and the aircraft industry. Set builders from Warner Bros. were delegated to create a fake city that completely camouflaged the plant. From the air, busy Douglas Aircraft looked like a collection of houses, buildings, and streets, with nearby runways disguised as farmland. 

Today, Hollywood and the airline biz are continuing to merge in curious ways. Recently, flying Delta, I saw a safety featurette that reminded me of the spoofy Airplane. As a chirpy-voiced stewardess described the plane’s features, the camera panned to passengers who were outrageously in dress and behavior. One slithered up the aisle on his belly like a trained seal; another breakdanced into his seat. Demonstrating the oxygen mask was an ALF-like muppet. And who was that giving us the thumbs-up from the cockpit? Yup, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.