The Old Man and the Gun, based on an article in the journalistically dubious New Yorker and written and directed by David Lowery (2016’s Pete’s Dragon), is apparently and unfortunately Robert Redford’s last motion picture as an actor. This is not entirely because it’s not as good as it might have been.
Of course, it’s chiefly because Mr. Redford is an excellent actor. In The Old Man and the Gun, the legendary director, producer and movie star of The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (and founder of the Sundance Film Festival), the audience catches glimpses of his ability. In grainy 16mm film, Redford replays many of his screen archetypes. He’s the criminal, the loner, the individualist. As a notorious bank robber, Redford’s first visual cue is a sign which reads: Rebel Junk Co.
Enter underappreciated Sissy Spacek (Coal Miner’s Daughter) as a Texas ranch widow to whom Redford’s felonious geezer takes a liking. Ms. Spacek shines in one of her best and most believable roles, joking to Redford’s cagey smooth-talker when he says that riding a horse is on his bucket list that he’d “better hurry up”. Her reply when he asks her where her husband is? “Dead—that’s where he is.”
If only The Old Man and the Gun had explored her intelligent character (one of Sissy Spacek’s best since her searching role in ‘night, Mother) and their relationship more. Instead, with a sleepy pace and strumming guitar score, the film is unimaginative. A big part of the problem with this movie, which as a Robert Redford and Pete’s Dragon fan I wanted to like, there’s more conflict in the Spacek-Redford union than in the cop-and-criminal interplay between Redford’s geriatric ex-con and Casey Affleck’s policeman.
Affleck, who weirdly looks and acts like he wandered into the early 1980s-set movie from the mid-1990s, behaves like he’s been heavily sedated. His ambivalent cop character comments that no one’s really motivated to catch the thief and his gang (Danny Glover and Tom Waits) “on account of nobody giving a shit”. Because this mildly entertaining movie doesn’t examine its own plot points and themes, why should anyone else?
Redford and gang, backed by old movie clips and channeling every Robert Redford movie from The Chase to The Horse Whisperer, are supposed to represent the presumably victimless, free-wheeling criminal. Setup and desired effect fail, however, because, as depicted, the exploits aren’t much fun. Redford’s codger missed a lifetime of love, which comes across in an Elisabeth Moss cameo. His supposedly charmed bank teller and branch manager victims would surely be traumatized for life, though the film treats the prospect of armed robbery by an old gentleman as a cute gag. (It’s hard to not notice that this premise originates with a publication now chiefly known for making unsubstantiated claims in the name of sympathy for unreported crime victims).
“That was then — this is now”, is the type of cliched line Redford must deliver in service of a script by Lowery which never feels authentic to any real life experience other than a long-form journalist glamorizing someone who steals what other people earn. That he does it for thrills hardly puts joy in the occasion, though because it’s Robert Redford, such a lovable rogue in The Sting and other movies, you want his bank robber to have a little fun.
Watching Robert Redford cap his unusual career in pictures with a role that bundles his roster of scoundrel roles into one, last movie isn’t the good time it might’ve been. Despite David Lowery’s artful scenes, shots and transitions, especially a whistling tea kettle, there isn’t much to rally around in his jovial but spent criminal, whose most interesting background material appears to have been left out of the final cut.
I suspect that what would’ve served The Old Man and the Gun better is a stronger sense of what has always been what I suspect is the source of Redford’s star quality. This quality permeates his subtle performance in The Way We Were, his Gail Wynand-type characterization in Indecent Proposal, his old rancher in An Unfinished Life, even his role in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park and certainly in Redford’s motion picture debut, War Hunt. The man gone rogue in crime can be fun, as Redford demonstrated again and again in his most popular bandit movies. But only for so long. The man who goes his own way for himself is the type which Robert Redford captures at his best: the individualist.
His most distinctive movie in this regard remains Sydney Pollack’s 1970s film Jeremiah Johnson. Robert Redford’s final movie evokes few moments from that earlier film. They don’t add up to a reason to recommend The Old Man and the Gun. But you might want to see it anyway to watch a movie star on screen one more time.