Review of Our Souls at Night (2017) by Erich — 04 Feb 2019

In case you're wondering, I don't consider a 6 to be a bad review; to me a 6 can be a solidly entertaining, even touching movie, as this one was to me. It just didn't rise to higher levels. One thing I liked about it, a special quality and rather rare for cinema, was its deliberately (yet casually) slow pace.

It was refreshing to see a movie that wasn't calibrated as though its audience had a slow attention span, condescendingly assumed to have little patience for scenes that proceed at the speed of... ordinary life.

Granted, it was at times surreal to see Robert Redford and Jane Fonda inhabiting the roles of normal small town retirees, widower and widow, and neighbors for decades who had never before really gotten to know each other.

But once you relax and suspend your critical faculties, honed over years of modern movie-watching to be expertly cynical, it becomes as heartwarming as a cup of cocoa from a grandmother you've taken for granted.

As the movie unfolded its steady, calm story, I became quietly amazed at how deftly Redford underplayed his role, and came to appreciate it as an act of generosity on his part, breathing life into his character with zero histrionics; or, to put it another way, he seemed to have achieved the role without "acting".

Fonda's persona, meanwhile, was delightful in small, circumscribed ways, she too avoiding the easy cliches that would have hammed it up. Together, in long scenes of merely talking to each other -- not with fast-paced, glib repartee, but through dialogues that allowed the beauty of our day-to-day banality an unstudied elegance -- they grew on each other, and on me.

And I'm sure glad at the end... well, I don't want to spoil it.