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Movie review: The Bucket List
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
TV’s beloved “meathead,” Rob Reiner adds a tear-dabber to his cinematic resume with his new dramedy smackdown, “The Bucket List,” starring two of Hollywood’s most beloved and most opposite actors, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.
Both are directors in their own right; both are highly honored for their acting; and both hold their own on their first joint film project. Their pairing here, while amusingly oil and water, is not going to result in the names of Nicholson-Freeman being added to the list of all-time great movie duos.
Reiner casts to type for the blustering egomaniac Edward Cole with Nicholson and the gentlemanly, zen-like Carter Chambers with Freeman. Reiner could have really had something if he had offered the actors the challenge of expressing polar opposites of their innate personalities. At the very least, assigning the career of auto mechanic to Nicholson’s character and business tycoon to Freeman’s might have injected sorely needed ingenuity to the formulaic, fatal disease story.
Another way in which Reiner and writer Justin Zackham could have offered a different take on this genre would have been to make the prospect of imminent death cause a reflective withdrawal in the extrovert Cole and a frenzied denial in the introvert Chambers. But, the story is what it is: jokey, hokey, pokey, as the two men bond over surgery pain, chemo brain and family strain during their initial residence in a shared hospital room.
Cole is estranged from a daughter and is a multi-divorced playboy. Chambers is becoming a stranger to his steadfast wife (Beverly Todd) of over 40 years. Carter doesn’t want to be “smothered by pity and grief” at home for the last year of his life. Ed wants to go out big; “put some moves on, instead of laying around hoping for a miracle.”
So, collaborating (“think big”) on a list Carter started of all the things he wants to do before “kicking the bucket,” the men start ticking off the items: skydiving, racing Mustangs, basking on the Riviera, feasting in Hong Kong, climbing the Pyramids, hunting the big cats on safari, taking in the Taj Mahal, soaking in a posh hotel’s bubble-filled tub.
The men peel back a lot of the accumulated layers of doubts and disappointments in their lives to share philosophies and to dare to intervene in one another’s unfinished personal business. Some of this works; but a lot is hard to swallow. Only Todd’s character provides an authentic quiver of reality as a woman who is “not prepared to lose a husband while he’s still alive.”
Rated PG-13.
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