Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland Chuck Their Meds and Hit the Road in “The Leisure Seeker”
By Alan Scherstuhl< Village Voice March 6, 2018
In “The Leisure Seeker,” Donald Sutherland (left) and Helen Mirren play a married couple who hit the road in a Winnebago while hoping to share one final adventure together..
Yes, if you were to jot down a list of things you expect to happen in The Leisure Seeker – a comic drama in which a married couple facing their last days embark on a Massachusetts-to–Key West Winnebago road trip — you would almost certainly get a lot right. There are winning vistas, some silliness with a motorcycle, a showdown with some rando thugs, a run-in with the cops. Yes, the couple loses and finds each other, and the journey they’re on turns out to be more than merely geographical. But for all its occasional familiarity, this first English-language feature from Italian director Paolo Virzì (Human Capital, Like Crazy) is moving in its sincerity, thanks to stellar casting and the director’s clear-eyed perspective on aging and dementia.
Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland play the couple, a duo who go together like matching furniture, their moods and habits perfectly shaped by each other’s. Even their ailments are complementary, one suffering in body and the other in mind: Mirren’s character, Ella, is facing cancer, while Sutherland’s, John, is losing his memory and his certainty about who he’s speaking to and what year it is.
Paolo Virzì’s much anticipated American debut stars Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland as an unwell elderly couple travelling across America on one last trip
We know the year: 2016. Virzì opens with audio of a Donald Trump campaign speech, a stab of the very now that audiences for The Leisure Seeker likely are attempting to escape. Later, deep in the South, Sutherland’s character will lose himself in a #MAGA rally, chanting the chants without grasping their significance. He’s a former professor of literature, a lifelong Democrat who just gets caught up in the moment without recognizing the foulness of the anti-immigrant fervor. Ella spirits him away, knowing better than him sometimes what the mind she’s loved for so long values and deplores.
She’s spent her life listening to him rattle on about Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway, and she’s planned this trip to show him his favorite author’s famous home in Key West. She lets him drive — he’s alert behind the wheel — but she’s fully in charge, except in those moments when he wanders off. Sometimes Virzì plays this for comedy, but there’s terror in these scenes, a species-level discomfort. If John gets lost, he could be lost for good. Ella, meanwhile, is off her meds and occasionally vomits. All logic tells you that this trip can’t end well, and Virzì establishes by the midpoint that working in the States has not made him sentimental. The final scenes feature a welcome sexual frankness you probably would not note on that list of what The Leisure Seeker will offer, and the ending — well, I misted up. (I did twice during the film, at the end credits and during a scene of the couple screening a slideshow of their past on a sheet hung up in an RV park. Both times I felt satisfied rather than worked over.)
The drama at first concerns the couples’ incidental bickering, his jealousies over her long-gone first boyfriend and her frustration at his failing memory, especially the way he can remember beautiful students of decades back but struggles to identify his own children. The performers are always lively, engaging, sometimes moving, and worth our contemplation.
The Leisure Seeker, the name given to their old campervan, is inspired by the novel of the same name written by Michael Zadoorian
Printer-friendly version
