MOSES’ ZOOMER PHILOSOPHY
HOLLYWOOD STARS: OLDER, BETTER, BANKABLE
How old is old? The answer is at the movies By Moses Znaimer
THIS PAST AUGUST, AN ACTION movie opened in North American cinemas to great fanfare. The Expendables 3, like its two predecessors, concerns the exploits of a group of veteran mercenaries whose proficiency at shooting bad guys and blowing things up seems at odds with the advanced ages of the Hollywood stars playing them: Sylvester Stallone, 68, Arnold Schwarzenegger, 66, Harrison Ford, 72. The Age factor – the The Expendables 2’ s poster proclaimed “573 years of action expertise” – provoked predictable snarkiness. But all that sniping hasn’t deterred audiences from flocking to the series, which has been a major money-maker. Along with another action franchise featuring “mature” stars, RED and RED 2, The Expendables has launched a new film genre: “GwG” – or “Geezers with Guns.”
I find the use of the word Geezer interesting: it’s funny and jarring at once. Geezer as a friendly nickname definitely points to our demographic finally getting our due on screen. Culturally, this confirms what we’ve been saying all along. On the other hand, Geezer, funny and friendly as it may be, is also an anachronism, out of sync with the reality of the New Old. How out of sync? By my reckoning, as much as two, maybe three decades: that’s how long it seems to take language to catch up to major cultural change like the evolution of Old Age! Meanwhile, the Arts – literature, theatre, music, film – have known about this cultural shift for some time. We’ll get to “Geezer Lit” and “Geezer Music” et al, as promised, in coming chapters; for now, movies have centre stage.
To test how well movies have mapped the evolution of Geezerdom over the past 30 years, I recently rewatched several age-related films from that period. Three seem groundbreaking in their reflection of the Geezer Shift.
My first selection is Murphy’s Romance, a 1985 film starring Sally Field and James Garner. Other noteworthy age-themed films came out before 1985 – Harold and Maude, On Golden Pond, Robin and Marian, Terms of Endearment – but Murphy’s Romance, which earned James Garner an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, did something unique. The last two words Garner spoke in that movie clearly identified the watershed definition of “old” at the time. The film’s plot centres on a 33-year-old divorcee named Emma Moriarty (Field) who moves to a small town in Arizona with her young son, Jake, to try to get back on her feet. She’s befriended by the town pharmacist, Murphy Jones (Garner), an eccentric older widower, who helps Emma’s business, protects her from the ex-husband and pays attention to Jake – all the while refusing to tell Emma, who’s dying to know, exactly how old he is. Their relationship moves from the impossible to the possible; the last scene finds them standing outside Emma’s house, goes like this: Emma: Stay to supper, Murphy? Murphy: I won’t do that unless I’m still here at breakfast. Emma: How do you like your eggs? (They turn to walk into the house together.) Murphy: I’m 60. “I’m 60” said it all in 1985. Garner himself was 57 at the time (Field, 39), but if he had said “I’m 57,” it wouldn’t have been the same. Thirty years ago, 60 was the watershed; 60 was old. That’s what made Murphy’s statement so meaningful; he was entrusting a younger woman he loved with the fact that she was about to make her life with, yes, a Geezer. But he was saying something else too: “I’m 60” isn’t a surrender; it’s a boast and a challenge to the world!
Over the next 15 years, on into the new millennium, various movies advanced this heretical notion that Geezerdom might be a fluid thing, that people who had always been consigned to creaky irrelevance once they’d hit a certain age, might in fact be capable of living active, meaningful, sexy lives. Shirley Valentine (1989), Waking Ned Devine (1998), Space Cowboys (2000, James Garner again) all pushed the envelope of “How old is old?” But I give my second groundbreaker prize to the 2003 comedy Something’s Gotta Give, starring Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton. Nicholson plays Harry Sanborn, a 63-year-old media mogul and playboy who only dates women under 30. His current conquest is the 20-something Marin Klein (Amanda Peet), who invites him to her mother’s beach house in the Hamptons, where they’re walked in on by Marin’s mother, a successful playwright named Erica Barry (Keaton) who happens to be, horrors, in Harry’s own age bracket. That night, during foreplay with Marin, Harry suffers a heart attack; he’s treated at a local hospital and, following doctor’s orders, ends up recuperating at Erica’s beach house where, predictably, he accidentally walks in on Erica when she’s naked. The exchange that follows is now famous: Erica: Ahh! Harry: [Seeing Erica] Oh! Oh.