TheStanley Tucci and Colin Firth carry this heartwarming movie from actor-turned-filmmaker Harry McQueen, which debuted in 2014. Remote areas, It was also in love. Tucci and Firth play Tusker and Sam, a couple that have been together for decades: Tusker is a respected novelist and a musical medal. (Firth gives his perfectly maintainable piano performance to Elgar’s Salut d’Amour’s performance, which is more than just a lumpy moment in the throat due to not being swollen.) Both of them had their careers put off because Tusker was diagnosed early – chronic dementia.
The couple decided to take their camper van on a trip north, have fun with Sam’s sister and her family, spend time alone together, and perhaps come to terms with the fact that this vacation could be their last vacation together. Tusker is still doing well. He’s still working on a new book, but he’s increasingly preoccupied with astronomy, gazing at the night sky, perhaps calming down the unimaginable vastness of space, compared to his problems of nothing. Is this new hobby therapeutic, or does it accelerate his slide into a mysterious void?
The supernova initially reminded me of my very uncomfortable debut Entertainment Finder, Blurry photo in which Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland play an elderly couple fighting on a recent Winnipago road trip in the shadow of dementia and death. But this was marginal and drunk: the supernova, despite all the twisting of the heartstrings and the pushing of the buttons, is more conservative, both in the relative calm of the performances and in an unadorned manner in the countryside. Her rural beauty is not forced upon us nor is there a pitiful fallacy. There is a nice moment when Sam and Tucker stand emotionless all night in a supermarket parking lot, whose motto is at least as prominent as steep hills.
Tucci and Firth have a cute and sweet chemistry, and their best moment comes when they have to share one bed in Sam’s old room in the family home where his sister still lives. They have almost Eric-And Ernie Relationship. Elsewhere, Macqueen builds interestingly on the established personalities of his pioneering men to show how their various behaviors were used to distract or neutralize difficult subjects. Sam Firth is a dry, reserved and lovely Englishman. Tucci’s Tusker is strangely amusing and entertaining in ways we’ve seen him from him many times before – making a key scene that, when his voice trembles about to cry, is even more impactful.
The main issue, as with all movies about dementia, is the exit strategy: These heartbreaking moments were famous in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Still AliceWith Julianne Moore, and more agonizingly at Michael Haneke LoveEmmanuel Riva pales in deadlock and silence after a stroke.
For Tucker and Sam, it’s something that can’t be said – unknown or unimaginable – and when they have to face the problem, it hurts in ways that neither shared jokes or shared love can numb them. Whether the movie itself completely confronts how the surviving partner lives, moment by moment, through its terrible ending is another question. I am not sure about that. But it is an honest and poignant image of two people firmly kissing death.
