The Old Man & The Gun

Synopsis: The true-ish story of Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford), a career criminal who, in 1981 at the age of 76, was busted for a series of small-time bank heists.

Older audiences will enjoy screen veterans Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek as they take a few leisurely spins together around the fairway in this genial senior citizens dramedy.

Adapted by director David Lowery from a story in The New Yorker, The Old Man & the Gun is much more about the old man than it is about the gun. Indeed Tucker has one but has never used it and his approach to robbing banks is to walk in, hand a briefcase to the manager or teller, ask them to fill it, and walk out.  By sticking to small-time banks, Tucker and his some-time partners Teddy (Danny Glover) and Waller (Tom Waits who appears to have contributed his own lines), nicknamed by the media The Over-The-Hill Gang, succeeded, more or less, in pulling off some eighty jobs in total. Of course this was in the ‘70s and early ‘80s when banks were a lot easier to rob than today (or so I assume since no-one does it anymore).

As a bank heist movie, David Lowery’s film is low on thrills but then that’s the point. When you get to the age of these crooks too much excitement is not a good thing. The Old Man & the Gun is reminiscent of David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999), a laconic story of an old geezer on a ride-on mower visiting his brother before it’s too late for them both, a film which, not co-incidentally I’m sure, also starred Sissy Spacek. Like it does, Lowery's film rolls along in its own good time. There is a kind of narrative thread in the form of a world-weary Texan law officer (Casey Affleck) who is doggedly  pursing Tucker but this is purposely kept at arm’s length.

In what is a kind of testament to his career as a screen charmer (the 82 year old actor, who was also one of the film’s many producers, has indicated that it will be his last film) The Old Man & the Gun is really a showcase of Redford’s star-power, still well in evidence even if his face is now as dessicated as a dried fig (late in the film, during a montage of Tucker’s escapes, we see a handsome young Redford in a clip from The Chase,1966). In this respect we readily understand the ease with which Spacek’s character, Jewel, befriends Tucker and offers him a brief respite from his rootless way of life. The film is very much about their blossoming relationship captured in some choice moments of suitably quiet togetherness (Lowery, probably wisely, seems to want us to understand that their relationship is platonic).

The trouble with all this nonchalance is that the film pretty much peters out, after a brief non-specific time-period coda wrapping up with end-titles rather than giving us a satisfactory dramatic resolution. We never find out what happened to Tucker or Jewel or his partners or his money (we see him at one point trying to buy Jewel's farm for her but nothing comes of it). Some time spent on this material would have made for a much more satisfying film.  As it it is The Old Man & the Gun feels like a low wattage story lit up by some major star-power.

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