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It starts like a sitcom and ends like a postcard, along the way Paul Mazursky finds the sweet spot with an easygoing burlesque of Umberto D. "I've been thinking about Lear..." Fellow septuagenarians comprise the eponymous duo, the widowed former teacher (Art Carney) and the ginger tabby he walks on a leash, foxy and feline codgers grudgingly dodging the Upper West Side wrecking ball. "Just a wanderer" in the wake of eviction, briefly crashing in Long Island with the businessman son (Philip Burns) before heading West to see the dispersed brood. The daughter in Chicago (Ellen Burstyn) has attained an argumentative independence, the son in Southern California (Larry Hagman) puts up a playboy veneer easily cracked. "You know people... that's home." An open landscape dotted with flakes and misfits, a tangy picaresque fueled by empathy and curiosity. The geriatric protagonist maintains a serene mind, keeps his sentiments astringent, plays straight man to a gallery of doodles. Zen grandson (Josh Mostel) and teenage hitchhiker (Melanie Mayron) give "the Pepsi Generation," the addled flame in the nursing home (Geraldine Fitzgerald) bestows one last dance. "No lectures," a runaway's request and also Mazursky's approach. Arizona sees Arthur Hunnicutt savoring his cameo as a vitamin peddler, Las Vegas accommodates a vaudeville routine with Chief Dan George's off-hand wryness. Saroyan is the presiding spirit, with notes adduced from Williams (The Strangest Kind of Romance) and Frost ("Brown's Descent, or the Willy-Nilly Slide"). Bonding over Ironside episodes and electric blenders, rejection of life-is-a-river metaphors: "Man has to struggle, or he'll drown." Lynch in The Straight Story locates the sublime in the migration. With Herbert Berghof, Dolly Jonah, Avon Long, Cliff De Young, Barbara Rhoades, Louis Guss, Cliff Norton, and Sally Marr.
--- Fernando F. Croce |