Movie Review -- "My Old Lady"
Oct. 11th, 2014 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kelly_chamblissWhile I was visiting my family last week, my BFF and I went to see the new Maggie Smith movie, My Old Lady. My rating: three out of five stars.
Now, no picture that stars Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline, and Kristin Scott-Thomas is going to be bad. The three of them are well worth watching -- excellent performances all. Kline is over-the-top and sort of operatic in his speechifying (which works for the character), so Smith counters by underplaying very effectively (and I was pleased to see that she's not just doing another riff on her "imperious grande dame" routine. Though she has some snarky moments, she's not merely playing Violet Crawley in modern dress. It's a different sort of role.)
Scott-Thomas has a rather thankless part as Smith's daughter and Kline's eventual love interest, but being the fine actor she is, she makes the most of the role and puts meat on its slender bones. (It's one of those "only-in-movies-and-fanfic" scenarios where she and Kline detest each other on sight, so you know that romance is inevitable.)
As for the story -- well, it's a creaky, theatrical melodrama that is not even vaguely plausible in the way it plays out. The premise: Mathias Gold (Kline) is a 57-year-old loser, a former alcoholic with three ex-wives and three unpublished novels who inherits a Parisian apartment from his estranged father. He uses his last penny to buy a plane ticket from NYC to Paris, hoping to sell the place for big bucks (it's in the Marais) and finally become financially secure.
Problem: When he gets to the apartment, he finds Matilde Girard (Smith) in residence. Seems Mathias's father bought the apartment under an odd French real estate practice known as a viager: the original owner gets to stay in the home until s/he dies, and the buyer has to pay a monthly stipend (rather like a mortgage payment that goes directly to the seller, not a bank). So not only can Mathias not sell the place, but he also has to pay Mathilde 2400 euros a month. What ensues is an odd mixture of comedy and pathos, and the two don't always fit smoothly.
The story was originally a stage play, and it shows in the adaptation: very stagy. It's structured like so many modern plays: everyone gets a couple of big speeches, everyone has secrets to reveal, everyone has explosive moments of revealing their deepest feelings. Yada, yada.
In short, it's a film that relies on its stars and its Monet-like shots of Parisian gardens to carry all the cinematic weight. Strip away the cast, and the story is silly, the direction merely workmanlike.
Still -- it's 100-plus minutes of Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott-Thomas, and Kevin Kline. What, I'm going to complain? (And I like to think of the lovely vacation the three of them must have had, filming a movie in autumn in Paris.)
Mathilde to Mathias: "How did you get to be 57 years old and have so little to show for it?"
Mathias: [paraphrase] "Well, that was charmingly blunt."
Mathilde: "I'm 90 years old. Subtlety doesn't interest me."
Now, no picture that stars Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline, and Kristin Scott-Thomas is going to be bad. The three of them are well worth watching -- excellent performances all. Kline is over-the-top and sort of operatic in his speechifying (which works for the character), so Smith counters by underplaying very effectively (and I was pleased to see that she's not just doing another riff on her "imperious grande dame" routine. Though she has some snarky moments, she's not merely playing Violet Crawley in modern dress. It's a different sort of role.)
Scott-Thomas has a rather thankless part as Smith's daughter and Kline's eventual love interest, but being the fine actor she is, she makes the most of the role and puts meat on its slender bones. (It's one of those "only-in-movies-and-fanfic" scenarios where she and Kline detest each other on sight, so you know that romance is inevitable.)
As for the story -- well, it's a creaky, theatrical melodrama that is not even vaguely plausible in the way it plays out. The premise: Mathias Gold (Kline) is a 57-year-old loser, a former alcoholic with three ex-wives and three unpublished novels who inherits a Parisian apartment from his estranged father. He uses his last penny to buy a plane ticket from NYC to Paris, hoping to sell the place for big bucks (it's in the Marais) and finally become financially secure.
Problem: When he gets to the apartment, he finds Matilde Girard (Smith) in residence. Seems Mathias's father bought the apartment under an odd French real estate practice known as a viager: the original owner gets to stay in the home until s/he dies, and the buyer has to pay a monthly stipend (rather like a mortgage payment that goes directly to the seller, not a bank). So not only can Mathias not sell the place, but he also has to pay Mathilde 2400 euros a month. What ensues is an odd mixture of comedy and pathos, and the two don't always fit smoothly.
The story was originally a stage play, and it shows in the adaptation: very stagy. It's structured like so many modern plays: everyone gets a couple of big speeches, everyone has secrets to reveal, everyone has explosive moments of revealing their deepest feelings. Yada, yada.
In short, it's a film that relies on its stars and its Monet-like shots of Parisian gardens to carry all the cinematic weight. Strip away the cast, and the story is silly, the direction merely workmanlike.
Still -- it's 100-plus minutes of Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott-Thomas, and Kevin Kline. What, I'm going to complain? (And I like to think of the lovely vacation the three of them must have had, filming a movie in autumn in Paris.)
Mathilde to Mathias: "How did you get to be 57 years old and have so little to show for it?"
Mathias: [paraphrase] "Well, that was charmingly blunt."
Mathilde: "I'm 90 years old. Subtlety doesn't interest me."