On a recent trip to the movies, I couldn’t help but notice once again how the art of movie trailers has sunk into a sewer of desperate pandering — of milking every last comic line from a cinematic cow whose udders are running on empty. The first trailer that popped up on the screen was The Skeleton Twins, which is ultimately a sobering drama about severely damaged twin siblings who, in the opening scene, attempt to kill themselves in unison, 3,000 miles away. In the trailer, it looks like a certifiable laff riot.
Next up was My Old Lady, another case of mistaken genre identity, which in preview form is an bland comedy about a middle-aged man (Kevin Kline) whose inherited Parisian estate comes with the provision of an elderly woman (Maggie Smith) guaranteed by law to remain on the property — and receive a stipend — until death. Cue a smattering of out-of-context lines of Kevin Kline saying some sarcastic things and Maggie Smith saying some characteristically blunt Maggie Smithish things, and you have a delightful, escapist romp for the over-60 moviegoer, which is the only audience buying tickets to independent films anyway.
Call me a cynic, but I believe if there was a way to make 12 Years a Slave look like an amusing, quaint period piece, the folks cutting trailers would have leapt at the chance. Is there something so awful about presenting a drama for what it is? Are we that averse to ingesting serious fare?
Needless to say, the laughs are few and far between in My Old Lady, Israel Horovitz’s debut as a writer-director, based on his play of the same name (which local audiences can absorb at Palm Beach Dramaworks come December). The trailer synopsis is correct in the basic premise: Kline’s Mathias does inherit a house with an old-lady provision — Smith’s Matilde — and she is something of a spunky, cool-headed sparkplug at 90. This comes as an unwelcome shock to Mathias, whose life is in a cinematic sort of shambles: thrice divorced, failed novelist, recovering alcoholic, penniless, his only hope of selling a 12-million-euro historical estate thwarted by its spry resident. Matilde also has a daughter, Chloe (Kristin Scott Thomas), who is Mathias’ age and who hates him upon first glance, though it doesn’t take a seer to prognosticate that this opinion might change by film’s end.
Like many of Horovitz’s plays, which have premiered on South Florida stages thanks to his longstanding relationship with artistic director Lou Tyrrell, My Old Lady’s story hinges and pivots on the unearthing of secrets, which shift current paradigms, open up cobwebby portals to a buried past, and suggest future possibilities. The chief twist isn’t really one; Horovitz reveals his cards in the way he shoots and directs his actors in a key early scene. But the movie’s headlong dive into subjects like suicide, infidelity, alcoholism and parental neglect is admirable and honest — and it comes as a welcome surprise given the film’s milquetoast trailer.
It’s easy to see why Horovitz wanted to turn his play into a film; while the movie is too talky to fully shed its origins, it is visually expanded, with some beautiful Parisian photography (not that one could make the Seine look ugly) and added characters, including an unorthodox French Realtor (Dominique Pinon).
I’d like to see this story on the stage, because I can’t shake the presumption that the film’s final blows have been too softened. But either way, Kline’s work here is a master class. He is as extraordinary as he’s ever been, in a performance that makes his spirited recent turn as Errol Flynn in The Last of Robin Hood look like a silly trifle. Like a lot of drunks, when he inevitably falls off the wagon in My Old Lady, he’s a different man, one who has devolved from a likable, still-charming rascal to an absolute degenerate. And when his Jekyll-and-Hyde spiral hits bottom with a shattering truth, his acting is even better, rife with the sort of nuance no trailer could capture.
MY OLD LADY. Director: Israel Horovitz; Cast: Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Dominique Pinon; Distributor: Cohen Media Group; Rating: PG-13; Opens today at Regal Royal Palm, Movies of Lake Worth, Movies of Delray, Regal Shadowood and Living Room Theaters in Boca Raton, the Classic Gateway Theater in Fort Lauderdale, AMC Aventura, the Tower Theatre in Miami, the Bill Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables and AMC Sunset Place in South Miami.