Redford’s Charming Swan Song

by Sandra Olmsted

Director David Lowery masterfully conflates the reality of Redford’s iconic career with the fantasy of Redford’s Tucker in The Old Man and the Gun and shows the audience that the years go by fast and that life is to be living if we are to be fully alive. The marriage of Robert Redford, who proclaimed this his final role, playing Forrest Tucker, a man ending his years doing what he loved most, doubles the film’s power. The deliciousness of that fourth wall of acting merging with Redford ending a life of acting portraying Tucker, who lived by convincing others of his charm and sincerity as he lied to them, reflects reality in cinematic fantasy.

Redford’s Forrest Tucker loves to rob banks, but not with a blaze of guns and threats to others lives. His style is smooth and polite as he talks the bank employees into fill is valise with money. His partners, Teddy (Danny Glover) and Waller (Tom Waits), seem only invited along for the ride at the generosity of Forrest. In the 1980s, just as Forrest falls for Jewel (Sissy Spacek) and maybe begins to dream of retirement, as Teddy does, Det. John Hunt (Casey Affleck), having been in a bank during one of Forrest’s robbery, finds new meaning in his career by pursuing the bank robbers, which leads him to Forrest’s trail of robberies. Although it is the cops-and-robbers genre, don’t expect the big car chases and lots of gunplay. Lowery turns the genre into more of a character study but one that isn’t slow.

What would pass for lingering character-study moments are always pregnant with suspense. During a bank robbery, a child sits outside in a running car so she can listen to the radio, and the expectation is she is in danger. As good as, even better than, ever, Redford’s performance embodies the gentler nature of this genre-bender and of the man Forrest is beyond his beloved profession. Once again playing the likable bad boy, just as he and Paul Newman did in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, reminds the audience of why we love to watch him perform — naturalness and sexiness and his imparting of nuance and intensity simultaneously. In terms of that sexiness he always exuded on the screen, Spacek and Redford’s gentle, electric chemistry show love is always hopeful and possible even when improbable. Their on-screen chemistry and their love story is just another reason of so many to see The Old Man and the Gun. In theaters now, The Old Man and the Gun, a Fox Searchlight Pictures release, is rated  PG-13 for brief strong language and runs a mere, well-paced 93 minutes. It is definitely Oscar season now, and there is bound to be Oscar buzz for The Old Man and the Gun.

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