Just Old Dudes Being Old: The Best of Getting Old Cinema

Having been mentally eligible for Social Security since the sagacious age of 18, I have a deep, abiding love for films centering around cranky old curmudgeons grappling with existential dilemmas. Yeah, we could call them “dad flicks”, but some of these are probably closer to grandad flicks as time has marched on. Here’s the lowdown on some of my favorites:

Junior Bonner (1972)

Dir. Sam Peckinpah

I stewed long and hard about which Peckinpah movie to use on this list, as at least 50% of his filmography dealt explicitly with old men being angsty. The Wild Bunch and Ride the High Country are the easy picks, but I wanted to highlight this obscure oddity in his filmography. While most of his work dealt with how the need to hold onto personal values and codes of honor leads inevitably to bloodshed, Junior Bonner is a surprisingly understated film, viewing the passage of time through quiet acceptance rather than trigger happy angst. Steve McQueen stars as Junior, a retiring rodeo star, who returns to his hometown to deal with his nutty family and compete in one last Independence Day rodeo. As in Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue, the real villain here is capitalism, slowly corrupting the purity of sport and replacing good hearted rivalries with a genuine need to win to survive. In a telling moment, Junior and his dad sit at an empty train station, lamenting how their lives have changed and where to go next, the railroad next to them, long a motif of modernity in westerns, symbolizing their departure from their pasts. Like all Peckinpah films, the only way out of this existential battle is one last hurrah, found here through a wonderfully shot bull ride sequence rather than the expected shower of gunfire. 

The World’s End (2013)

Dir. Edgar Wright

Bro, don’t you just hate it when you’re trying to crack some cold ones with the boys in your old stomping grounds and end up having to try stop an alien takeover of the world? People can say Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz are his best films, but no other entry in Wright’s credits come closer to actually melding comedy and genuine exploration of ordinary life. There’s always something disconcerting about returning to your old hometown when you’ve been away for a while. Everything looks slightly different and you don’t recognize people as much. There’s an inherent melancholy to such an experience, something Wright taps into and pushes to the obviously logical extreme: everyone there is robot duplicate created by aliens. With a great mashup of the likes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing, it’s got the familiar Wright mix of genre satire but with darker subtext of depressive nostalgia, anti-globalism, and self-destructive behavior. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s role swap of the wild card and straight man respectively make for the heart of the film, embodying the kind of increasingly one-sided friendship where one friend is still flailing around in an attempt to relive their glory days and the other is just tired of his shit and wants to go home to his wife. Pegg is the epitome of the “guy who peaked in high school” and the crux of film is built on his precarious mental state that someone in that mindset is inevitably left in, as his entire worldview is predicated on hermetically sealing himself in his early 20s and never leaving it, reality be damned. He’s a character from a tragedy who just so happens to be in a comedy, and that contrast is what makes the humor so great. As the film races towards its conclusion, the tone neatly parallels the feeling of a drunken night out, with light-hearted reverie giving into sadness and paranoia. Like Pegg’s character realizes by the film’s conclusion, too many drinks inevitably lead you to take a good long stare at your reflection at the bottom of the glass. You just got to hope that you like what you see.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Dir. Quentin Tarantino

I’m not a hardcore Tarantino acolyte, having strong positive feelings about only half his filmography, but I cannot deny that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was one of my favorite films of last year. A big reason for this is that, for the first time since Reservoir Dogs, it felt like a truly autobiographical film for Tarantino himself. Gone are the homage-fest pastiches of Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight and in their place is a bittersweet swan song for a man who feels out of place in the modern filmmaking industry. Rick Dalton (Leo DiCaprio) IS Tarantino, a man of more “traditional leanings” being overtaken by a bunch of hip young bucks and politically progressive upstarts. It’s no coincidence that Rick mockingly calls one of the Manson family members “Dennis Hopper,” a sly nod to how Hopper’s Easy Rider would radically change the American filmmaking paradigm and put traditionalist Westerns that were the bread-and-butter of actors like Rick out to pasture. Art, like time, stops for nobody and it’s easy to see how someone like Tarantino, once celebrated as a radical maverick changing the filmmaking establishment in the ’90s, feels alarmed that he is now part of the same establishment, one that has given way to digital over 35mm, blockbusters over a steady stream of mid-budget pictures, and a ravenous thirst for the new over a veneration of classical cinema. Revisionism has been par for the course with Tarantino for a while now, but I don’t think it was used in a more heart achingly personal way by him as it was in OUATIH.

Texasville (1990)

Dir. Peter Bogdanovich

"He's already gone away, honey. He's just gone away to the past."

Hometown heroes are forced to reflect on their salad days in Peter Bogdanovich’s sequel to his seminal breakthrough, The Last Picture Show. While that film followed the lives of teenagers in 1995 small town Texas, Texasville revisits them in 1980’s Reagan America. Spoiler: they’re still just as fucked up as ever. I love how so much of the dialogue in this is comprised of local gossip, with unspoken relationships of years long past still forming the backbone of the ultimately substance-less conversations of present day, reflecting how the characters are still stuck in a sort of limbo 30 years later. The outright bleakness of The Last Picture Show is replaced with quiet melancholy as middle-aged, barely functional adults flail around for one last chance at excitement in their mundane lives yet failing to see that they’ve already given way to the next generation. A telling beat in this is when Duane’s (Jeff Bridges) son changes the radio station almost immediately from a classic country song to a (then) contemporary ’80s pop song. The songs change, but the tune of small-town America stays the same.

Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980)

Dir. John Sayles

I’ve never seen The Big Chill, but I doubt it’s as funny or wryly insightful as this early flick from indie icon, John Sayles. I’ve been a big fan of Sayles from his horror screenwriting days on stuff like Piranha, but I’ve slowly been parsing my way through his directing career. Return of the Secaucus Seven feels like patient zero for so many movies that came out after it, focusing on a group of 30-somethings who have eschewed responsible adulthood in favor of a weekend of drinking, fucking, and premature midlife crises. This is 100% a dialogue film, as the direction is entirely focused on conversations rather than movement or action. This allows the characters to not only breathe and slowly reveal the shared backstory between them, but also unravel the idealistic selves they knew each other for in college have slowly been chipped away by corporate America and the failure of the nation to achieve their 1960s flower child dreams. It’s a film soaked with a feeling of regret, of romance not pursued, careers not realized, and talk not walked. Sayles’ dialogue doesn’t directly tackle these concepts though, opting to have the characters engage in mundane small talk to skirt around their insecurities rather than face them head on. It’s the cinematic equivalent of seeing old friends again who you have a complicated history with after a long period of time; there’s a rift of unspoken tension that no parties want to address, yet constantly eats away at everyone involved until its near unbearable and it either explodes or someone leaves. Sayles is keen to point out that this rift not only doesn’t go away but gets wider with every year under your belt.

They say that movies (and art in general really) change with you as you grow up, each viewing connecting different life experiences you’ve accumulated since your last viewing impacting the meaning you derive from the work. With these films, I don’t doubt that they won’t hit me even harder each time I see them and the characters on-screen begin to mimic my own evolving perspective even more.