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Winners of this year's Movies for Grownups Awards are a diverse group. From veteran actor Glenn Close's mesmerizing performance as a wife who is overshadowed by her Nobel Prize-winning husband to Richard E. Grant's witty and wonderful portrayal of a forger's partner in crime, to director Peter Farrelly's perfect touch at the helm of Green Book, there was much work to honor in the stories by filmmakers over 50.
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Best Movie for Grownups: Green Book
Far-fetched yet fact-based, the film is about elitist jazz genius Don Shirley, who hires beefy Copacabana nightclub bouncer Tony "Lip" Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard on a 1962 tour of the Deep South. The trip makes them fast friends despite differences in culture and race, and exemplifies the kind of smart, socially aware, emotionally absorbing, mature-actor-starring feature the Movies for Grownups Awards were founded to recognize. It’s also the feel-good movie of the year.
Best Actress: Glenn Close (The Wife)
At 71, the seven-time Oscar nominee who calls herself “a late bloomer” does a career-capstone performance as the smarter, neglected spouse of the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, who owes her a literary debt greater than the one Thomas Wolfe owed Max Perkins. Film fans are forever in her debt: Her subtle, blazing, amazing performance evokes the depths of a long marriage and dramatizes society’s nasty habit of sidelining gifted women, especially as they age. Her expert face registers multiple emotions like a pond caressed and troubled by shifting winds.
Best Actor: Viggo Mortensen (Green Book)
Not even Lord of the Rings star Mortensen was sure he could play a 1960s Italian American nightclub bouncer and bodyguard. In fact, he turned the role down, until the director convinced him he could pull it off — as he does, at least as well as John Travolta or Al Pacino could have done. He vindicates an idea at the core of Movies for Grownups: that talents can improve with age. Mortensen, 60, told AARP that such a role would have been tougher in his youth: “I think you have to be a certain age. As you get older, you definitely learn something.”
Best Supporting Actress: Judi Dench (All Is True)
At 23, when she won her first fame as a Shakespearean stage great, a film director told Dench that she’d never make it in movies. She did become a movie star at 63, in 1997’s Mrs. Brown, and 170 major film honors (including the Oscar for Shakespeare in Love) soon proved that guy a buffoon. At 84, her star has never shone brighter than when she plays Mrs. Shakespeare, mending her marriage by a flickering fire.
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