Moving On
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 23 minutes
Stars: Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Malcom McDowell
Writer/Director: Paul Weitz
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
Not all movie stars are great actors, and not all great actors become movie stars — but then there is Jane Fonda, whose decades spent both honing her craft and carefully curating her screen roles have made her the prototypical artist/superstar.
Exhibit A today is Fonda’s new comedy, Moving On, a film that, in any other hands, would be little more than a pleasant diversion from writer/director Paul Weitz, a master purveyor of lighter-than-air comedies (About a Boy, American Pie). But such a low bar just won’t do for Fonda. Here, at 84, she effortlessly floats from hilarious to tragic; from sexy to scary; from vulnerable to downright dangerous. Name any actor of any age, and all but a few of them would handle those gear shifts with all the savvy of a 10-year old fighting a manual transmission.
Fonda plays Claire, a woman who, while attending the funeral of an old friend, approaches the newly minted widower, Howard (a blustery Malcolm McDowell), and informs him, cool and casual-like, that sometime in the next day or two she is going to kill him. The reason behind that rather rash announcement unfolds over the film’s brisk 83 minutes, but from the start, we have no doubt that whatever the old boy did, he deserves it.
Alternately discouraging Claire and egging her on is her oldest friend, Evelyn, played by Fonda’s longtime Frank and Gracie TV costar Lily Tomlin — whose perfectly timed, laugh-out-loud entrance nearly stops the film in its tracks, and in a good way.
Tomlin has worked with Weitz before: She starred as the plucky old gal (what other kind would she have played?) in Grandma (2015), a similarly formulaic, yet no less enjoyable, female empowerment/road picture. Here, she and Fonda slip into their roles as if they were fuzzy bathrobes, renewing the comfy chemistry they first engendered more than 30 years ago in 9 to 5.
Among today’s successful filmmakers, Weitz may also be the most economical: He’s never made a movie longer than 1 hour 49 minutes, and his comedies usually clock in way short of an hour-and-a-half. For that alone, in an era when directors seem to be getting paid by the hour, Weitz deserves a special Oscar. That brisk pace calls for rapid changes in tone, and as a result his films often seem to leap fearlessly — some might say recklessly — between the merry and the maudlin. Weitz doesn’t always get away with it, but here his stars and supporting cast build a bombproof-wall around a landmine-strewn premise — one that at any moment could explode in a messy plume of sentiment. Richard Roundtree is a gentle, calming presence as Claire’s long-ago husband, the one who never knew the trauma that caused her to break up their marriage. In a small but essential role as Howard’s daughter, Catherine Dent shows that good people can evolve even from the worst ones.
But most of all, this is the Jane and Lily show. Have any two stars since Bob and Bing ever had so much fun together? Happily, as an audience we get to share their love.
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