Watching Robert Redford breeze through The Old Man and the Gun, I am reminded that a minimalist drama like this can serve one purpose only if it wants: See an 82-year-old movie star gracefully perform again, with dignity. However, this film offers more in its smallness: seasoned actors like Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, and Tom Waits provide momentary joy beyond Redford's sustaining charisma.
Despite the clichéd bank robbery motif, based on the real-life career of serial robber Forrest Tucker, his eighty robberies and 16 prison escapes reveal not a mean man but rather a charmer who robs because it makes him smile and who helps others when he doesn't have to.
Old Man hints at deeper emotional possibilities when it's discovered that his daughter, played by Elizabeth Moss, is unknown to him:
Jewel (Sissy Spacek): "Do you have any children?"
Forrest Tucker: "I hope not."
The film likes to keep these moments underwritten to suggest the depth as a richness he hasn't ignored but prefers to keep at bay.
That spareness of emotion, dialogue, and sustained discourse adds to the mystery of a man who floats above daily intercourse to pursue a passion, albeit robbery.
Redford shuffles a bit like an old man, but he teases us with the wisdom he holds behind that killer smile and a youthful insouciance that makes him ageless.
You will not be revisiting the wisecracking of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or the sophistication of The Sting; you will get a fun heist film featuring a star who evidences the reason he has 78 entries in his filmography and originated a seminal cultural institution, The Sundance Institute. A bit like the underplaying but still prolific and passionate Forrest Tucker.
It's infectious: "I've been thinking about a bank robbery my whole life." Ryan Gosling
