Three old guys hard up for cash and with an axe to grind turn to a life of crime -- or, at least an outing -- and in the process discover a sense of purpose that’s been missing.
Sound familiar? And not just because “Going in Style” is a remake of a 1979 film. It turns out movies about oldsters robbing banks and such are a veritable enterprise unto themselves.
There are zero surprises to be had with this dramedy caper starring Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin. We know how everything’s going to go, 1-2-3. Part 1: Grievances. Part 2: Planning the Heist. Part 3: Things Don’t Go Exactly as Planned, But Turn Out Fine.
The main reason to watch this film is the threesome of outstanding lead actors plus a nice supporting cast. They convey a sense of lived-in warmth and contrariness that you just can’t fake without four-fifths of a century of living, or thereabouts.
Freeman plays Willie, Arkin is Albert and Caine is Joe. All three are retirees from the same steel company that’s pulling up stakes and moving overseas, dissolving their pensions in the process. Turns out their bank is complicit in the move, so they feel no qualms about robbing the place.
They’re not greedy: They just want what they’re owed, and not a penny more.
John Ortiz plays a career criminal who hooks up with the boys and walks them through the paces. Matt Dillon plays the obtuse FBI agent leading the chase. Ann-Margret is the local seventysomething hottie who casts an amorous eye at Albert.
“Going in Style” isn’t a bad movie, just an unambitious one. With three great actors like this, you could just have them read random Tweets onscreen and it’d probably be equally entertaining.
Bonus features are rather modest in scope. The DVD version contains a feature-length commentary track by director Zach Braff. Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo pack, and you add a handful of deleted scenes.
Movies about oldsters turning to crime, in particular robbing banks, are hardly a novel event. Between "Tough Guys," "The Crew," "The Grey Fox" and "Family Business," Geriatric Robbers is practically a genre unto itself. Heck, even Sinatra and the Pack were getting a mite long in the tooth when they made "Ocean's 11."
Indeed, "Going in Style" is a loose remake of 1979 film starring George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg that no one really remembers.
The new version features Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin. All are charming playing up their familiar persona: Freeman has a twinkly charisma and tart wisdom; Caine is peevish but warmhearted; Arkin is cantankerous and grouchy.
The plot the movie puts them through is quite tired and predictable, though. All play retirees of a steel company that's moving to Vietnam and dissolving their pensions, so they decide to get payback by robbing their own bank, which is complicit in both the pensions and trying to foreclose on one guy's house.
(I love that the screenplay, by Theodore Melfi, doesn't even bother trying to explain why a Brit has been living and working in New York City for at least 30 years but hasn't lost his Cockney accent.)
Caine is Joe, Arkin is Albert and Freeman is Willie. They're working-class guys who live across the street from each other, meet at the same coffee shop most days and are all unmarried -- whether bachelors or widowers, we know not. Their pension checks have suddenly stopped showing up and Joe has fallen behind in his mortgage payments. When he goes to the bank, the smarmy banker (Josh Pais) blows him off. But then some bank robbers knock the place over, and as they say a seed is planted.
Willie is in the latter stages of kidney failure, and as an old guy with crappy insurance he's near the bottom of the transplant list. Arkin is Willie's longtime roomate, the kind who spends a lot of time complaining and sleeping.
Roughly the first half of the movie is the planning of the heist, with a little help from a local criminal played by John Ortiz. The second half is the actual robbery and aftermath, with Matt Dillon as the full-of-himself FBI agent investigating the case. Even dogs don't like him!
In between is a little bit of character and family stuff. Joe lives with his daughter (Maria Dizzia) and granddaughter (an irrepressible Joey King), and during the course of the heist preparation he tries to get his estranged ex-son-in-law (Peter Serafinowicz) to reeneter their lives. Willie wants to be well enough and wealthy enough to travel to see his people more than once a year. Albert finds himself pursued by Annie (Ann-Margret, still a dish at nearly 76), a grocer who shares his appreciation for cooking and jazz.
Director Zach Braff ("Garden State") milks the obvious laughs for all they're worth, such as elderly sex. Albert seems stunned to find himself in a relationship with a hot old mama. "She likes me for who I am. I don't even like me for who I am!"
And, of course, there are plenty of old jokes. "Are you guys 5-0?" asks a suspicious low-life. "We're closer to 8-0," Joe deadpans.
Christopher Lloyd -- great name, that -- shows up as Milton, the hilariously senile guy at the local seniors club. Among his foibles is using a bullhorn for most of his conversations. For him, life's a non-stop bingo game and there are always balls to be called.
Ziobhan Fallon Hogan is the sassy waitress at their diner, who we just know is destined for the world's fattest tip. Kenan Thompson plays the security chief at the Value King grocery store where the boys first practice their criminal ways; he feels professionally insulted as he reviews video of the trio stuffing hams down their pants and whatnot.
"Going in Style" reminds me of an old test Gene Siskel used to give
movies: instead of the film, would you rather just watch that same cast
of actors sitting around, eating lunch and chatting with each other? I'm
not sure this movie would pass.
A man sits in a dusty tent in a foreign land, taking notes. He's asking some teen boys about awful experiences they've been through via an interpreter. We've seen this movie before: he's obviously a journalist, doing important work, and we know it's just a matter of time before we hear the words "New York Times" or "Washington Post." (It's the Times.)
One of the boys is reluctant to divulge. The man says you can trust me. More hesitation. So the journalist coolly flashes a $100 bill, neatly folded between his fingers. The interview concludes, the money changes hands, a terrific story later appears on the cover of...
...wait, what?!?
I would hope that most people would know that paying sources to talk is a big journalistic no-no. So obviously something's not right with this guy, Michael Finkel, played by Jonah Hill. We're not surprised when, a few minutes later into "True Story," he's fired for fudging the facts. Disgraced, shunned by colleagues, he retreats to his Montana hometown.
The problem is, the filmmakers want us to like this guy. Or, at least, identify with him. "True Story" is supposed to be the tale of a guy who reaches rock bottom and then pulls himself back to the top with the story of a lifetime. Instead, Finkel remains a moon-faced mystery, a guy who never fully confronts the depth of his deceptions.
If Finkel is a puzzle, then Christian Longo is a total enigma. He's the big story Finkel is after: a seemingly normal man who is accused of murdering his wife and three young children. His tale wouldn't even be known if it weren't for one thing: while on the lam, he sometimes used the alias of Mike Finkel of the New York Times.
The real Finkel is intrigued to know why Longo impersonated him, and reaches out to him in prison. "I was wondering if you could tell me what it's like to be me," he writes. The men meet. Longo is cryptic, but offers his story, exclusively. Finkel sees a shot at redemption and a big payday.
Things go on from there, with the two forming a quick bond with deep undercurrents of mistrust. Is Finkel repeating his mistakes, trying to mold the facts to fit the killer story he's pitched to book publishers? Is Longo a manipulative fabulist exploiting the reporter for his own ends?
This sounds more interesting than it actually is. Director Rupert Goold, who co-wrote the script with David Kajganich, wants to give us a mix of "Shattered Glass" and "In Cold Blood," a probing tale about the intersection of crime, truth and justice.
Instead, it turns into a rather dull succession of scenes in which Hill and Franco spar listlessly across a bare table in the prison interview room.
Hill, I think, is a promising young actor whose head has been swelled by a couple of Oscar nominations he clearly didn't deserve. He hasn't developed enough nuance in his screen presence to carry a dramatic picture. His Finkel comes across as a disaffected dope. Franco is better, snaky and sharp, but it sometimes feels like he's smirking at the camera.
Felicity Jones plays Finkel's wife, whom he uses as a financial and emotional reservoir to sponge off of. In lesser hands this sort of role turns into a thankless, dreary distraction -- and these filmmakers' hands are lesser.
There are the bones of a good story in "True Story," but the movie is content to take us to places we've already been to before. For instance, it never satisfactorily answers the question behind the main premise: why did Longo impersonate Finkel?
The only thing more disappointing than sloppy storytelling is the lazy kind.
Writer/director Noah Baumbach makes movies that often seem lightweight at first glance, even frivolous, but creep up on you with their hefty themes and cerebral contemplations.
The newest from the filmmaker behind “The Squid and the Whale” and “Frances Ha” is “While We’re Young,” about a married couple in their 40s (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) who fear life has passed them by and want another shot at youthful liberation. They do so using another couple who are about 20 years younger as surrogates, befriending them and absorbing their carefree lifestyle.
“Young” is simultaneously very funny and very thoughtful. The movie is trenchantly observant about how we live today as individuals within a changing society, especially how evolutions in technology have affected the ways in which we communicate with each other and tell stories – for good or ill. (Mostly ill, in Baumbach’s take.)
Baumbach visited some of these same themes in “Greenberg,” which also starred Stiller as a Generation X guy trying to fit in with the Millennials, and looking poorer for the effort.
Josh (Stiller) is a formerly successful documentary filmmaker whose career has been swallowed by his latest project, 10 years in the making and not any closer to completion, or even coherence. It’s something about power in America, but not only is Josh incapable of summing it up in an elevator speech for potential financial backers, he couldn’t even do it if they took the stairs.
His wife Cornelia (Watts) is a producer for her father (Charles Grodin), a storied documentarian – think Pennebaker or Maysles -- who used to be Josh’s mentor until they diverged on aesthetics. Josh promotes the idea of the “personal documentary,” in which the filmmaker is an active participant in shaping a narrative.
Cornelia and Josh get along seemingly well. They’ve got their work, they don’t seem to want for money, and they have a small circle of acquaintances their own age. But there’s an undercurrent of regret there.
They have no children (after failed attempts years ago), and feel estranged from their closest friends, Marina and Fletcher (Maria Dizzia and Adam Horovitz, both terrific), who just had a baby that their lives now revolve around. And Cornelia sits in the middle of the schism between her husband and father.
Things change when they meet Jamie and Darby, played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. They’re 25-ish hipsters, married but otherwise seemingly untethered to adulthood. He’s an aspiring filmmaker who attends one of Josh’s classes, and she makes her own ice cream. In very short order the two couples have glommed onto each other, with Jamie seeking professional help from Josh and Cornelia finding emotional support from her counterpart.
This section contains quite a lot of laugh moments, such as Cornelia’s horror after being roped into her friend’s baby music class, or Josh pathetically copycatting Jamie’s slouchy fedora and vinyl obsession. There’s also a great scene in which they attend a New Age-y session where people drink ditch water to inspire hallucinations and purge the soul (and stomach). Stiller ponders dizzily, sounding like Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now.” And the shaman, who rides a hip Vespa, frets about his charges purging onto his carpet.
But things get more somber, and smarter, as time goes on. Jamie, played assuredly by Driver, proves to be a sly manipulator, affecting too-cool nonchalance while quietly directing events in his favor. Josh begins to resent his young pupil/guru and his film methodology, especially regarding a project about a disturbed Afghanistan veteran (Brady Corbet).
If the film has a weak spot, it’s that the female characters start out as full partners in the storytelling process and gently recede into the background. The movie becomes more and more focused on Jamie/Josh, with the Grodin character as the third leg.
My objection is a mild one, based not on political correctness but regret for missed opportunities for insight. At 97 minutes, this is the rare film these days that could stand to be longer.
In many ways, “While We’re Young” is Noah Baumbach’s most mature work to date. For a little while I thought the movie had simply forgotten to be funny, but it was deliberately morphing into a second half that is decidedly less jovial but inarguably more profound. Such is life, and moviemaking.
