Robert Redford has been so famous and so great for so long that any movie that he makes these days is about the mythology of his stardom. The reason David Lowery’s latest film, The Old Man & the Gun, works so well is because it fully leans into that. The film takes place in the 80s, but so early in in the 80s that it’s essentially still the 70s, and that subtle period setting sets the template of artifice that runs throughout Old Man & the Gun. Redford plays a man named Forrest Tucker, a bank robber notorious for breaking out of prison over a dozen times. The film is based on a David Grann New Yorker article, but Lowery isn’t working in facts here, but style; and few stars could give Lowery the style he needs more than Redford.
Over 70, Forrest resides in various places throughout the Southwest, robbing banks with his two henchmen, Teddy (Danny Glover) and Waller (Tom Waits). Forrest has a friendly, casual nature to his robberies. He usually does his job with a smile and goes out of his way to put the various tellers and bank managers at ease, flashing a gun but never brandishing it, and certainly never firing it. The rate of his success hardly bothers the people of Texas, California, New Mexico and the various other states he’s pulled off his schemes. The exception is Texas detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck), who happens to be inside one of the banks Forrest holds up while he’s holding it up. He doesn’t even realize it until the deed has been done.
Forrest and his partners would probably stay out of Texas and Hunt’s searching eyes if it weren’t for Jewel (Sissy Spacek), a retired widow with a vast horse ranch. She runs into Forrest when her truck breaks down on the highway, and he decides to help her. With Jewel, Forrest shows that his charms exist beyond the bank floor, and their relationship blossoms affectionately with her having no idea of his criminal hobbies. Waller and Teddy aspire toward the big score, the one that will lead to retirement, but Forrest is driven by a pathological need for mischief, a discomfort with any kind of legitimate lifestyle. Even his relationship with Jewel is charged by keeping his activities secret from her. But his scores get chancier, and Hunt and his crew begin to close their circle around him.
Lowery, a Terrence Malick protegé who usually trends toward methodical existential meditations, takes a different tact here with a humorous script and loose, candid performances from an accomplished ensemble. This is a far cry from last year’s A Ghost Story which wowed some with its life-stalking meticulousness, but I found pretentious (and, at times, explicitly obtuse in its handling of American race politics) with its purposely drawn-out single-frame sequences. That film and 2013’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (which is, I must say, quite good) use dread bluntly throughout the story and the filmmaking. Not so in The Old Man & the Gun which is, in contrast, filled with lyrical movement, graceful framing, a tinge of Altman in the meandering nature of the camera and his use of overlapping sound. Which is all to say that The Old Man & the Gun has a unburdened joy about it, an upbeat quality that refuses to be stymied by the illegalities its protagonist commits.
A lot of that comes from Redford, whose performance is wonderfully comic, though marked with those brief glimpses of melancholy that the Hollywood legend has been delivering for over half a century. Redford announced that The Old Man & the Gun would be his last movie before wading into retirement, which gives Lowery’s film an extra weight to it. Hollywood retirements are usually about as solid as a house of cards, but Redford has been working a lot in the last five years, reconstructing one of the most beloved careers in the business. All is Lost, Our Souls at Night and The Old Man & the Gun would probably be right up there amongst his very best acting work, and those all came after the age of seventy-five. What David Lowery does here is allow Redford to grasp his youth for one last time, and the legend does not disappoint.
Written for the Screen and Directed by David Lowery