Sunshine Boys

By Frank Rich

GOING IN STYLE

Directed and Written by Martin Brest

Most bad movies take a few minutes to reveal their worst sins. Going in Style announces its mediocrity right away. As the heroes (George Burns, Art Carney, Lee Strasberg) are first seen sitting on a park bench in Queens and making introductory small talk, Going in Style lapses into immediate and terminal catatonia. The actors are listless. The camera does not move. The lines are separated by silences that would give Harold Pinter pause. One strong whiff of Going in Style, and the audience is transported directly to slumberland. For the next 90 minutes, there is little reason to stir. By telling the story of three elderly men who rob a bank, Director-Writer Brest (Hot Tomorrows) apparently meant to make a poignant statement about the loneliness and financial indignities that can grip old people. The subject is worthwhile, but Brest never comes close to giving it either tragic or comic life. Except for the funny holdup and a brief subsequent Vegas gambling spree, Going in Style has only dull, homely sequences that alternately patronize and sentimentalize the aged. The mordant humor of Carl Reiner's Where's Poppa? and the fiery compassion of Paul Mazursky's Harry and Tonto are nowhere to be found.

Brest's dramatic style is all too literally geratic. His method of shifting mood from farce to pathos is to slow down the tempo of the soundtrack score. He telegraphs each plot point so far ahead that every event seems like a repetition: when Burns silently dreams up his robbery scheme, one can almost see a bulb turn on over his head. Many scenes are mercilessly padded with gratuitous reaction shots or pointless bits of local color; for this director, the shortest distance between two points is a figure eight.

Worse still is Brest's maltreatment of his cast. Though Burns and Carney are virtually fail-safe comics, the film's clunky timing robs them of their laughs. The crabby Strasberg is given free rein to show off his entire catalogue of italicized acting gestures. It says something about this movie that one feels nothing even when two of the three supposedly lovable heroes die. When a film is as moribund as Going in Style, death is not a tragedy but merely an anticlimax.

-- Frank Rich

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