Carpe diem not all it’s cracked up to be
Blythe Danner endearing in kickstarter-funded dramedy
I’ll See You In My Dreams (out of five) Directed by: Brett Haley Starring: Blythe Danner, Martin Starr, Sam Elliott 92 minutes
Perched at the bar next to her new friend Lloyd, Carol sips from a martini glass and asks the bartender, “What do you call this? An appletini! Do you have a pen? I’ve gotta write that down.” Carol is older and wants to keep track of her life by way of lists. She scratches down the name of the vodka and schnapps blend onto a napkin and puts it in her pocket for later.
With a charming sweetness, Brett Haley’s kickstarter-funded I’ll See You in My Dreams commits to memory small pleasures such as this (day-drinking Chardonnay is another), and the film’s cadence is one of many tiny joys accumulated over time.
Endearing from start to finish is Blythe Danner in the role of Carol, a widow living in L.A., who is gracefully striding into the last phase of her life swathed in raw silks and linen neutrals, with a simple to-do list posted on her fridge.
Lloyd (Freaks and Geeks legend Martin Starr), is the pool boy she has befriended.
Listless, Lloyd has a college degree in poetics in hand and a post-employment economy staring starkly back at him. It is the generational anachronisms (cocktails with ridiculous names, the Internet), that get the laughs, but their relationship is as captivating and tender as Carol’s romance with Bill (Sam Elliott with a Churchill clamped between his teeth).
Carol acknowledges small pleasures with a crooked smile, but chafes at the received idea (no doubt embroidered on pillows and tattooed on lower backs across North America) that one must live fully in the present moment.
Rather than kneeling at the altar of carpe diem, Carol measures her life by its losses, with urns arranged on her mantelpiece like beloved talismans.
Grief isn’t the worst way to mark time. It may be quirky and solipsistic, but grief is also one way in which we establish the criteria for love, and who we have cared for the most deeply. Loss is something of an abacus whose beads we slowly draw over the course of our lives from one side to the next, measuring what counts.
Danner’s Carol is the most magnetic when talking about these losses, as when she winces involuntarily over dinner with Bill, who asked unexpectedly about her dead husband. Danner’s face contorts into a moment of pain before she regains her normal composure — it’s as if her grief has its own muscle memory.
Carol is a friend to a bevy of chatty older gals (June Squibb, Mary Kay Place and Rhea Perlman) whose retirement-living antics are fun interludes, and she is mother to Katherine (Malin Akerman’s character is flat — the better to accentuate Danner’s spirited fullness).
But what I liked most about the character of Carol is her reluctance to be categorized as mother or widow. She is just Carol, a woman who is more than the sum of her social roles and whose life needn’t be spoken of in the past tense just yet.
Slightly meandering with an occasionally lacklustre script, I’ll See You in My Dreams is still a worthwhile 90 minutes.
If nothing else, it offers respite from the prescription to seize the day and suggests that maybe a life well lived is one more simply measured in scrawled napkins.