If 'The Old Man & The Gun' really is Redford’s final film, it is a good one to end his career on.
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What a film to end an illustrious career on. ‘The Old Man & the Gun’ is Robert Redford’s swansong after a career of nearly fifty films. The Sundance Kid is retiring.
Working for the second time with director David Lowery, Redford plays Forrest Tucker, the ever-polite gentleman bank robber. Together with his two long-time buddies played by Tom Waits and Danny Glover, Tucker robs banks by approaching the unsuspecting bank teller, suavely raising his jacket to reveal the gun hidden inside and, calmly and politely, instructs the teller, who is always a female, to put the money into the bag. And as smoothly as they walked in, they leave the bank and no one is none the wiser.
Except for that one time when the bank that’s getting robbed by them is being patronized by a police detective, Casey Affleck’s character John Hunt, and thereafter he is put on their case. It becomes a game of cat and mouse, a kind of “Catch Me If You Can”. Digging into Tucker’s past, Hunt discovers just what kind of person he is chasing - a career criminal who simply loves what he does: escaping prisons and robbing banks. He gets a professional satisfaction and thrill out of it.
Tucker also falls in love. He meets her stranded in the middle of the highway trying to fix her broken down car as he’s trying to make a getaway after a heist. Gentleman that he is, he offers a ride to town. She’s Jewel, played by Sissy Spacek, a widow who lives alone on a large ranch where they hang out. Or he takes her to restaurants and they talk. When you put two great actors together, even their silences are interesting. Redford and Spacek share an electric, relaxed chemistry; their performances shine effortlessly.
‘The Old Man & the Gun’ plays like a western period film from the 70s and 80s, thanks to the cinematography and music, the kind of films that made Redford’s name, in particular, ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’. The music contains notes of melancholy and wistfulness, suggesting an end to an era, a feeling of a cowboy riding off into the sunset. If this really is Redford’s final film, it is a good one to end his career on.
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