Beyond Golden Pond

by Edward Guthmann

In Hollywood, where most movies are made with an eye to their largest and most loyal market -- teenage boys -- the chances of producing a film with older characters are slim. For every Driving Miss Daisy or Nobody's Fool, we get a rash of Rush Hours and a pestilence of Pearl Harbors.

A person could die of thirst waiting for a smart, grown-up movie with mature characters. But I'm not giving up hope -- not with millions of baby boomers turning 60 and 65 in the next decade. Considering the huge population approaching its seniority, I can't imagine that American moviemakers, both the Hollywood kind and the independents, can ignore that group and their concerns.

Until that happens, here's a list of 10 movies, available on video and in some cases DVD, that explore, illuminate and in some cases enliven the experience of elders.

• Central Station (1998). Fernanda Montenegro is Dora, a tough old broad living in Rio and making her living writing letters for people who are illiterate. Caustic Dora destroys most of the letters, but when circumstances bring her together with a motherless boy, the caustic woman finds unexpected humanity.
• Driving Miss Daisy (1989). It takes decades, but gradually a bond forms between a cantankerous Southern widow and her stalwart, uncomplaining chauffeur. Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman are the players and you won't find a better pair of performances in a single film.
• Harold and Maude (1971). Impossible not to love this one. Ruth Gordon is Maude, a free-spirited 79-year-old who haunts funerals and burials. Harold (Bud Cort), a morose 20-year-old, becomes her apprentice, lover and partner in jest -- and learns to embrace life through Maude's cheery example.
• Ikiru (1952). An aging civil servant panics when he learns he is dying of cancer, then goes on a drunken binge and finds solace in converting a city dump into a children's playground. One of Akira Kurosawa's greatest.
• Iris (2001). Judi Dench, Kate Winslet and Oscar winner Jim Broadbent are perfection in this somewhat stiff but brilliantly performed portrait of novelist Iris Murdoch in her last years. Dench plays Murdoch in her later years when Alzheimer's sapped the author of her ability to write. Winslet is the younger Murdoch.
• Nobody's Fool (1994). Richard Russo's wise, elegiac novel is brought to the screen by Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer), with Paul Newman playing Sully, an aging handyman living in a small, snow-covered hamlet in upstate New York. Sully's messed up most of his life, but the chance of reconciliation with his son and grandson creates new hope.
• The Straight Story (1999). The late Richard Farnsworth gave a landmark performance as Alvin Straight, an Iowa farmer who at 73 drove a '66 John Deere large lawn mower to Wisconsin to visit an ailing brother. Farnsworth is a miracle: stoic, innately honest, so unfettered by gestures that he hardly seems to be acting.
• Strangers in Good Company (1991). An unknown gem, directed by Canadian filmmaker Cynthia Scott, about a group of older women stranded near a deserted lake when their tour bus breaks down. Survival schools are called forth, secrets shared and hearts opened. The actresses, mostly nonprofessionals, play themselves.
• Umberto D (1952). Italy's Vittorio De Sica made this heartbreaker about a dignified old pensioner who is forced onto the streets with his dog when he can't pay the rent.
• The Whales of August (1987). Bette Davis and Lillian Gish are widow sisters living in Maine -- one cranky, the other benign -- in this bittersweet tale of memory, family and infirmity. Gish is superb: sitting alone at night before a framed photo of her husband, she pours a glass of red wine and lights a candle. Simple, profound, classic.

Edward Guthmann is a film critic and reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.

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