June Squibb’s career has run on a different timeline to that of most movie stars: she made her film debut, in Woody Allen’s Alice, at the age of 60, and it was another 23 years before she landed her breakthrough role in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. Her performance as an embittered pensioner who saltily badmouths past acquaintances and flashes the gravestone of an ex got her an Oscar nomination. It also got her a run of progressively less amusing naughty-granny roles. In Hollywood, older people can be blandly comforting support or quirky joke fodder but not much more.
In Thelma, however, the now 95-year-old Squibb gets her first leading role, as a phone-scam victim tracking down those who robbed her, and adds some welcome human shading to the pensioner-behaving-badly stereotype. Its heroine may ride a scooter on her quest for justice, but Josh Margolin’s film avoids cheap jokes of the old-people-say-the-darnedest things variety, and amid its generally cheery tone makes some sharp points about how society patronises and shortchanges its senior citizens.
Squibb’s Thelma joins a small and variably dignified club of old-age rebels in the movies, some played for comedy, others for poignant drama. There are no overt jokes to speak of in 1985’s The Trip to Bountiful, for which Geraldine Page won a long-belated Oscar shortly before she died. The rebellion of her character, Carrie, is a gentle but determined one as she escapes the guardianship of her protective son and resentful daughter-in-law to return to her childhood home town. It would make a fine double bill with David Lynch’s The Straight Story (Amazon), his most uncharacteristically tender film, in which Richard Farnsworth’s ailing war vet defies social convention and road laws to journey across state lines in his inchingly slow tractor to visit his ailing brother.
Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt – briefly featuring Squibb – finds more offbeat comedy in the senior road-trip premise, as Jack Nicholson’s emotionally adrift widower hits the asphalt in a Winnebago to disrupt his daughter’s wedding, though the film ultimately comes down on the side of taking the nicer, kinder, more regular path in life. There’s certainly little kindness to be found in Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, a film that can hardly be said to respect octogenarians by casting a latex-bedecked Johnny Knoxville as one – not least in an elaborate gag where his penis is caught in a vending machine – though there is something to be said for its unsentimental vision of a grumpy old man without the usually mandatory heart of gold.
Frank Capra’s delicious 1944 black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace (Internet Archive) took old-age malevolence up a notch with its memorable duo of beaming maiden aunts who also happen to be calculating murderers – albeit for a cause, as they aim to relieve lonely bachelors of their supposed suffering. There’s less sinister senior criminality to be found in Martin Brest’s Going in Style, as elderly friends George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg plot and execute a bank heist – though as their crime has fatal consequences, this seemingly jaunty farce takes on a surprisingly melancholic tone. (Zach Braff’s 2017 remake is far cuddlier and less interesting.) Roger Michell’s delightful The Duke, starring Jim Broadbent as an art thief improbably motivated by his rage against retirees having to pay for TV licences, is a pensioner heist movie with fully good vibes.
As for love and sex in old age, movies tend to treat that as gingerly as possible, preferring to imagine everyone celibate past the age of 60: Ron Howard’s hit fantasy Cocoon (oddly not available to stream, though its sequel, Cocoon: The Return, is) had to resort to alien intervention to imagine senior citizens getting randy with one another. Harold and Maude, meanwhile, remains a black comedy classic because its depiction of a soul-deep romance between a 79-year-old woman and a twentysomething man retains a subversive, eyebrow-raising edge half a century later. Starring three-decades-apart Anne Reid and Daniel Craig, Michell and Hanif Kureishi’s The Mother plays a similar idea for sober drama, with solemnly harsh consequences – a grandmother punished for not being quite bland or benign enough.
All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified.
Also new on streaming and DVD
Magpie
Daisy Ridley has long struggled to establish herself as a credible lead outside the Star Wars universe. Tense and vulnerable, she gets a good vehicle to that effect in this effective domestic thriller, playing the wife of an emotionally abusive writer. As she navigates a toxic relationship, director Sam Yates avoids glibly empowering cliches.
The Story of Adele H
Discerning classic label Radiance gives a glorious Blu-ray release to this long-undervalued François Truffaut historical drama, starring a then 20-year-old Isabelle Adjani as Victor Hugo’s romantically ill-starred daughter. The film-making is somehow lushly textured and at the same time startlingly austere; Adjani’s prodigious intensity and fragility carries it.
The Outrun
Saoirse Ronan’s raw-nerve performance as a flailing alcoholic anchors this tumultuous, affecting adaptation of journalist Amy Liptrot’s memoir. It avoids grungy, addiction-drama cliches and has a surprising environmental focus, as the spectacular landscape and wildlife of the Orkney Islands play a key role in the recovery arc.
