The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

rating: ****

the story: An old bank robber proves charm is his greatest weapon.

review: I've become a huge fan of director David Lowery.  Last year's A Ghost Story was a creative masterpiece and career highlight following previous films promising great potential (Ain't Them Bodies Saints, the live action Pete's Dragon).  However, he's one of the young directors of his generation who's found it tough to find much popular, much less visible critical success.  Scoring what's billed as Robert Redford's final role is probably a good way to get some attention.  The results are once again worthy of the potential.

Redford was at the head of another creative generation, one of the brightest acting talents to come out of the '60s, where he made one of his earliest standout films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where he first teamed up with Paul Newman (they struck again with The Sting), and set the tone for what Lowery evokes with The Old Man & the Gun.  Redford made a career out of his effortless charm. His most recent mainstream role was as a bad guy in the MCU, the Marvel superhero Avengers franchise.  I feared that this was how younger moviegoers were going to end up remembering him, and maybe they still will, but at least now he gets to go out on a high note, one that's all his own.

The idea of the "good" rogue is at least as old as Robin Hood, the criminal as likable, even defensible.  Casey Affleck, who also appeared in Ghost Story and Ain't Them Bodies Saint, and as such has easily become a signature Lowery collaborator (he starred with Rooney Mara in them, and I wish she'd appeared in this one, too), plays a cop who eventually sympathizes with Redford's bank robber after spending most off the movie trying to catch him.  Tom Waits (arguably continuing to reap the benefits of being Heath Ledger's purported model for his iconic Joker in The Dark Knight) and Danny Glover play Redford's fellow crooks, while Sissy Spacek plays a woman who falls for his charms in a purely romantic sense.

By the time Lowery allows himself to become showy (the whole thing is actually his filmmaking as more accessible, beyond Redford's appeal, than he's been in the past), playfully chronicling Redford's many jailbreaks, setting up the ending, you can appreciate the subtlety of the storytelling even more.  A lot of other directors would've dwelt on that element a lot longer, and thus lost the point, and taken the focus off of Redford himself.  But we do get a brief look at vintage Redford screen footage during the montage, and that's another great way to help say goodbye.  In an era where we're suddenly resurrecting dead actors via CGI seemingly without batting an eye, remembering we have old footage available, and knowing how to use it, seems a lot more, well, artful.

And "artful" is what The Old Man & the Gun is all about, the art of moviemaking, the old charms, the timeless charms, and adding to them, explaining them, maybe. 

Seven Psychopaths

****

directed by: Martin McDonagh
starring: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, Tom Waits, Olga Kurylenko, Abbie Cornish, Zeljko Ivanek, Harry Dean Stanton, Kevin Corrigan, Gabourey Sidibe

Released in 2012.

Seven Psychopaths could very easily be mistaken for the continuing series of movies that wish very badly they were directed by Quentin Tarantino.  Except, much like Joe Carnahan's movies, this is at worst a variation of a Tarantino flick.  It's a film by Martin McDonagh, and that's becoming a thing now, after this and In Bruges.

Both star Colin Farrell, although aside from gunplay there's very little else that's overtly similar between them, other than confident and spectacular filmmaking on a fairly intimate level.  Bruges was about a hitman who felt great remorse after the accidental murder of a little kid.  Psychopaths is about a writer who's trying to work on a new story, but his subject matter has inadvertently drawn him into the very life he's been trying to evoke.  The writer is Farrell, the friend who causes the latter is Sam Rockwell.  If you know Rockwell at all, and you should, that part should more or less explain itself.

It's the structure that really makes the movie pop.  McDonagh allows us to follow the characters Farrell is writing, and they have terrifically compelling narratives all their own, and even when you think the movie's done with them it surprises you again by bringing them back.  Part of that is because at least one of the characters is drawn from the web Farrell is being drawn into, an acquaintance played by Christopher Walken.  Walken is in top form.  He's got a famously deadpan expression, but he knows how to sell a role because hardly anyone delivers a line like he does.  I'll bet that anyone who just knows the name of the film and that Walken (not to mention Rockwell) appears in it will already think they know everything they need to know.

And yet the true genius of McDonagh is that he subverts every expectation.  He knows and you know because that's one of the themes, what Farrell's writer tries to do and Rockwell's main function is to try and embody the reverse.  Woody Harrelson is another presence that begs the boundaries of these expectations.

It's just this side of brilliant.

One of the things I look for in any movie that is or approaches brilliant is the ability to sneak in actors as good as the ones anyone will know appears in the movie in supporting roles.  Here the list includes Olga Kurylenko (proving once again she's not just a pretty face), Kevin Corrigan, and Harry Dean Stanton, who has made a career of these kinds of roles.  There's also Tom Waits, better known for his music, making another periodic movie appearance.  His most recent role was in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  His appearance here is as similar as he could get.  It's also worth noting that the late Heath Ledger based his Joker in The Dark Knight on Waits.  Ledger's Joker is the iconic psychopath of modern cinema lore.  It stands to figure that Waits would have to be featured in a movie with that term in its title.

If you're another of those film fans like me who enjoyed the chaos of the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading, this is an experience you'll definitely enjoy.  Farrell is restrained, for the most part, but he loses his kit at least once, and that may be worth seeing right there.