In real life, Helen Mirren is a terrific driver disappointed that she didn’t get to do her own stunts in The Fate of the Furious — she once beat Kristen Scott Thomas and Brian Cox on the racetrack-competition show Top Gear. But in The Leisure Seeker, she’s a Southern belle who lets her husband (Donald Sutherland) take the wheel because he’s the ace driver in the family, as well as an English professor emeritus who loves Hemingway almost as much as he does his missus.
Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren star as a husband and wife in "Leisure Seeker." For the two, it's a reunion of sorts — they played a couple in another film nearly 30 years ago.
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He has Alzheimer’s and she has cancer, as we gather from her awful wig and whiskey-and-painkillers regimen. So she packs him into the 1975 Winnebago they had dubbed the "Leisure Seeker,” grabs her pills and a shotgun, and lights out from Massachusetts for a last, loving road trip to the Hemingway Home & Museum. He periodically forgets where he is, who his wife is, and the very word “wife,” but he can still rattle off reams of literature for the edification of a waitress. And he can still drive, though sometimes he weaves, attracting cops.
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Mirren and Sutherland have chemistry even better than the last time they played a couple (1990’s Bethune: The Making of a Hero), and the teasing fondness the pair exhibit on their publicity tour for the film spills over into their roles. It seems like they’ve been together so long they’ve fused into one soul, half of which is evaporating. When they stop at campgrounds, she hangs up a sheet outside the van and projects their home movies to jog his receding memory. Other campers watch too, warming themselves around the fire of a half-century romance. Some of the memories involve infidelity, so it’s about both love and pain, not just sentimental wish-fulfillment fantasy.
This setup sounds as promising as road-trip hits like About Schmidt, Nebraska or Little Miss Sunshine, and the actors’ sky-high accomplishment makes us hope for a late-life love tale like the Jane Fonda-Robert Redford Our Souls at Night or the Sam Elliott-Blythe Danner I’ll See You in My Dreams.
Sadly, it’s many cuts below all of the above, because in his first American film, rising Italian director Paolo Virzì makes lots of mistakes. His odd blend of comedy and pathos erodes emotional realism at points, and he was better at adapting an American story into a critique of Italian society in Human Capital than he is at critiquing America in The Leisure Seeker. He doesn’t seem to understand America, though he sure knows how to make it look beautiful onscreen. When the professor wanders into a Trump rally and starts chanting excitedly, forgetting that he’s a liberal Massachusetts college prof, it’s meaningless, as is a glimpse of a Clinton rally. Most of the folks the couple encounter are contrivances: puzzled cops, a motorcyclist who helps her catch up with her husband when he absentmindedly drives off in the Leisure Seeker, and thugs who don’t realize how handy an old gal can be with a shotgun. The couple’s adult children, fretting about their risky trip and wondering where they’ve gone, add nothing to the plot or the drama.