'An all round the houses road movie' - Review: The Leisure Seeker

With: Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland, Janel Moloney

Runtime: 112 minutes

FOR an industry that so badly wants to make money out of audiences of a certain vintage, cinema is chronically uncertain about how to appeal to them.

Should it portray old age as a rage against the dying of the light (Amour, On Golden Pond), or as one big caper with the odd serious moment (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Cocoon, Quartet)?

The Leisure Seeker, Italian director Paolo Virzi’s comedy drama about an elderly couple’s road trip, takes a different tack, opting to go all round the houses in search of answers to what it means to grow old together. You may wonder why it bothered.

But since the travelling will be done in the company of acting royalty Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren, you may decide it is worth leaving the house for anyway. Don’t they say old age, if you are lucky, is a time of choices?

Adapted from the novel by Michael Zadoorian, the leisure seeker is the name of the camper van in which Ella and John Spencer (Mirren and Sutherland) decide they want to take from their home in Massachusetts all the way down to the Florida Keys to visit Hemingway’s home.

For John, a former academic specialising in the great American novelist, it is a pilgrimage. For the couple’s middle aged children (played by Janel Moloney of The West Wing fame, and Christian McKay (Me and Orson Welles), the surprise departure of their parents is a nightmare. Dad was meant to be going into hospital and mum to live with her son. Now everything is up in the air, or on this case on the road.

It soon becomes clear there is another reason for taking this elderly Thelma and Louise trip now. John has dementia. His memory is worsening by the day, as is his health in general. If he does not go to Florida now, they likely never will.

As they set off it is summer 2016, election year, the big fight, Trump v Clinton. Virzi (Like Crazy, Human Capital) signals the changing nature of America by having the couple call in at a petrol station they used to frequent on family holidays south. It’s all changed there, with a young Syrian couple running the place now. But then John and Ella find most things are different, not least their relationship.

She is now more or less a full time carer, with all the feelings that accompany such a job. While still in love with her husband, he exasperates and exhausts her. “I’m sick and tired of having to remember everything for you,” says Ella. Her joy when John has a brief period of lucidity is equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming to behold.

The same feeling is kindled when the couple are having a slideshow at a campsite. One after another, strangers wander up and stick around to see what is happening. They do not know the people in the slides but all our yesterdays, the scene suggests, are essentially the same blizzard of images and occasions: the birthdays and Christmases, the first steps, the good times.

It is such a simple scene but one that says so much. One only wishes Virzi had practised the same economy in the rest of the film. Instead, the tale begins to seem as long as the road with Virzi having a shopping list of points to make, as when he has the pair stop off at a Make America Great Again rally just to show, once again, that the country the couple grew up in has changed. Other scenes are repeated to no effect, run too long, or seem an unnecessary detour from whatever point the picture is trying to make.

Throughout all this to-ing and fro-ing, Mirren and Sutherland remain steadfast and true. The have the easy intimacy of a couple who have been together a lifetime, and the stature and confidence to play scenes that would have younger actors quaking. Neither holds back in showing the audience that old age, as Billy Connolly’s character in Quartet said, is not for cissies.

What remains at the end of the road movie is a feeling that Mirren and Sutherland could have said so much more given the chance to stay in one place a little longer (or even stayed at home).

As it is, The Leisure Seeker sends both stars and audience on a road to nowhere they have not been before.