Tinseltown is finally growing up...

Published May 15, 2015

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Mr Morgan’s Last Love

Rating: ***

My Old Lady

Rating: ***

Ageing is taking centre stage in Hollywood movies more often. Diane de Beer catches two new ones.

Mr Morgan’s Last Love, starring Michael Caine, Clemence Poesy, Justin Kirk and Gillian Anderson, and My Old Lady, with Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas and Maggie Smith.

Neither of these films are worth more than a three-star rating and yet, if you are of a certain age or dealing with people/parents reaching the last stretch of their life, they will have you thinking, smiling and enjoying probably more than most. It’s almost like teen movies, but for the other side of the spectrum, a bonus for the baby boomers and a very specific target audience.

That’s why there are so many films made these days for people growing old, because so many of those who have a say in movieland, are part of this dominating group.

What is interesting is to see how they are telling the stories and how family relationships – alienated children specifically – take centre stage in many of them.

Take these two as an example. In Mr Morgan’s Last Love, we’re dealing with a man who has lost the love of his life. He had focused on her solely at the cost of his children because he felt that he didn’t have enough love to share. Obviously with her gone, he is devastated, but understandably there’s also not much love lost between him and his adult children.

In steps a young lass (Poesy) who feels she can make a difference in his life. Young enough to be his daughter, their friendship is a strange one because you tend to think in these situations that it will lead to a romantic liaison which would have been just another ho-hum movie.

There’s more to it than that and that’s what makes this an important, if perhaps improbable, movie and perfect to catch in the comfort of your home.

My Old Lady offers similar bouquets. The story here is even more improbable, but because of a cast that includes Smith, Scott Thomas and Kline, they manage to pull it off.

Kline’s character arrives in Paris where he hopes to find a lifeline, but instead discovers an old lady living in the apartment that his father left him. How it works is that she has a lifelong lease arrangement and he has to pay her a monthly stipend until she dies – and he finally becomes the full owner – without strings – to this apartment.

With Scott Thomas as the daughter, all kinds of surprises and secrets come tumbling out and, of course, dear Maggie saves the day over and over again with her inevitable but much-loved one-liners. Writers can’t resist because she delivers them so perfectly.

And again we’re dealing with parents (some dead and shouting from the grave), while others are still alive to (maybe) atone for what is viewed as their sins. The siblings, in the meantime, all of them adults (with sometimes children of their own) have to come to terms with their dying parents, but also a feeling of discontent because they feel deprived of something they thought they should have been given but never received.

It’s also a different take on that old friend – dysfunction. There is always time to make amends is what both these films seem to suggest most strongly. Instead of wallowing in your misery and playing the victim that in the end destroys your life, start communicating and mostly, loving; it’s never too late.

While both of these are small movies, it is their casts that have added to the joy of the stories, because they’re old hands and know how to pull it off – and they do. Schmaltzy as they may be, the stories hit at the heart if you’re ready for the message.

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