In short: The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford) may be elderly, but he’s also the brains behind the operations of a triple old man bank robber gang (also consisting of characters played by Danny Glover and Tom Waits, so they’re pretty awesome). Because they are keeping a low profile with non-violent, polite heists on small banks in different states where typically nobody but one teller does even realize what’s happening before Forrest (who is also the face of the operation) is gone, nobody has connected the dots about these robberies being perpetrated by the same men yet. Until, that is, police detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck) doesn’t notice a thing about a bank he is in with his daughter getting robbed. This bugs him enough he starts to investigate further, and finally puts two and two together until it adds up to “elderly bank robbers with style”.

At the same time, Forrest starts a romance with horse rancher Jewel (Sissy Spacek) who just might be the person that could finally make him grow up into the “proper” life of normal people and retire.

I admit I didn’t really get along with director David Lowery’s much praised A Ghost Story; that one just stepped over my line where a film turns from slow to glacial. Nobody would confuse The Old Man & the Gun with an action movie either, and even though this one even has a kinda-sorta car chase, it is very much another slow-paced exploration of character much more than of plot. However, The Old Man seems appropriately slow, not just for the age of its main characters, taking its time but taking exactly as much time as it needs.

A part of the film is clearly an homage to 70s cinema, a natural road to go for a film starring Redford and Spacek, but it’s never an attempt at empty nostalgia. There is a melancholy quality to the film, for sure, but it’s not a nostalgic one but one belonging to a film looking at the final act of someone’s life and casting actors in the final stretches of their careers. There’s a clear love for his leads and the movie world they come from in Lowery’s visual language, and while he’s never quite being so boring as to just copy the visual style of 70s movies, he manages to achieve the same feel this period of cinema had in a slightly more contemporary way.


The film’s main thematic drive examines another very 70s idea: the meaning of freedom, as embodied in the happy, smiling Tucker who has turned his life into a series of escapes and never stopped to become a proper grown-up, not even for love, and Affleck’s Hunt who has done so, and is now, despite a family he clearly loves deeply, bored and a bit sad and decidedly grumpy. Lowery doesn’t really attempt to show up any of these character’s lifestyles; rather he seems more interested in exploring the space between them, the strange intimacy between the hunter and the hunted (even when the hunt like here is a rather sedate one), and the ways Forrest and Hunt are more alike than it might first appear, both looking at each other with the wistfulness of looking at the road not taken.