...an absolutely glorious landfill of random information, some of it substantive, much of it useless.
Don’t expect a comic romp from “The Bucket List.” Although the hype and trailers
have promised high comedy, the movie is far more reflective than the promise. If
you are a baby boomer in your fifties, the movie will trigger early thoughts of
your own mortality. If you are seventy and up, it’s a guarantee that your own
bucket list will have taken first shape by the time you leave the theater.
A bucket list
is, of course, the final tally of what you would want to experience if you had
been handed a medical death sentence like the one handed to both Edward Cole
(Jack Nicholson) and Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman) in the cancer wing of a
hospital owned by Edward Cole, hospital tycoon. At one point or another, each
man endures pain, vomiting, surgery, chemotherapy, baldness, fear, and sadness –
a pretty long string of negatives for a comedy, and yet director Rob Reiner,
whose hand is not steady in shifting between comedy and tragedy, forces the two
patients to wrap it all in good humor. Playing true to their own images, Jack
Nicholson makes Edward a cranky, unpleasant roommate for Morgan Freeman’s always
dignified, cerebral Carter.
Of the two,
Freeman’s contained portrayal of Carter hits us harder. Carter, whose dreams
were sidelined by the mechanics of living, became an auto mechanic. Along the
way he crammed his head with an absolutely glorious landfill of random
information, some of it substantive, much of it useless. He passes his hospital
time answering every question on TV’s “Jeopardy.”
Jack
Nicholson’s Edward is a cynic who speaks his nasty thoughts. Edward is alone in
life by choice (after four marriages that failed for the same overwhelming
reason: he’s Edward). Intrigued by Carter’s bucket list, Edward adds a few of
his own line items and talks his equally sick new friend into experiencing the
list. The cynic finally endears himself to us by quietly paying more attention
to Carter’s dreams than to his own. For once, he is looking after someone else.
Director
Reiner slips with a few squirmy moments that make an old person look silly. Sex
in the rest room of an airliner, for instance, is not something an audience
wants to visualize in its elders. The rest is fine: they skydive, race the car
of Carter’s dreams, go on Safari, and see the pyramids – always living at the
peak of the luxury Edward can afford. The charm of the movie lies in some of the
unexpected ways the bucket list items are realized and the understanding of each
man toward the other as their friendship grows.
Still, Rob
Reiner’s film is a heavy handed string of clichés. Morgan Freeman and Jack
Nicholson deserved far better than this; but for our pleasure, they have used
their huge talents to create characters who have given us the productive
assignment of drawing up a bucket list that might do for us what it did for
them.
Copyright (c) Illusion