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My Thoughts on Moving On

Although it proved to be one of the surprise box-office successes of the year so far, I did not care for 80 For Brady and it was for reasons far removed from the fact that I can’t stand Tom Brady. My chief complaint was that it took four of the most gifted American actresses that you could possibly imagine in Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno and Sally Field and then gave them the kind of material that barely would have passed muster as a made-for-TV movie done in 1985—the four having to pretend being backup dancers in order to gain admittance to the Super Bowl, Field winding up in a buffalo wing-eating contest and other things that I have thankfully repressed. Sure, it was great to see them all together but wouldn’t it have been greater—or even just good—if they had been given a script that knew how to make use of their talents.

Evidently Fonda and Tomlin must have felt something along those lines because less than two months later, they have returned in Moving On, a film that is about as far away from 80 For Brady as you can imagine, both in its ambitions and its results. Instead of giving them substandard material for them to skirt by on based on nothing more than the collective good will they have built up over the decades, writer-director Paul Weitz has given them, not to mention a couple of other veteran performers from the era when they were all superstars, a high-wire act of a project that effortlessly moves between jet-black comedy and deep drama and allows them all to show that age has not dulled their gifts in the slightest.

As this is one of those films where you are better off going in knowing as little as possible about it, I will keep my description as vague as possible, though those who are particularly spoiler-averse should probably bail out at this point. Suffice it to say, the film starts as Claire (Fonda) is preparing to attend the funeral of Joyce, her best friend ever since they met at college about 60 years earlier. It soon becomes evident that she is experiencing more than the usual feelings of grief and loss because when she arrives and greets Joyce’s widower husband, Howard (Malcolm McDowell), she whispers in his ear that she is going to kill him and does so in a manner that tells both him and us that she is not kidding. As we eventually discover, she has a very good reason for this, an incident between the two of them that happened a half-century ago that she never told Joyce about and which still burns inside her with a white-hot intensity.

Then during the service, Howard’s eulogy is interrupted by the singularly awkward arrival of Evvie (Tomlin), another friend from college who was also Joyce’s roommate. Afterwards, Claire and Evvie meet up and Claire explains her plan to kill Howard. Since Evvie was the only person whom she confided to about the incident in question, she understands Claire’s grievance but also recognizes that her friend has a lifelong tendency for announcing great plans that she never quite follows through on. Nevertheless, she agrees to help Claire with her scheme—there is no love lost between her and Howard either and besides, there is not much else going on in the life of the one-time cellist now living in senior housing and unable to play because of her arthritis.

What happens from this point, I leave for you to discover but even from my brief description of the opening scenes, you can already get a sense that there is more going on here than was found in 80 For Brady or other recent films that have rounded up casts of genuine screen legends and then given them scraps that they might have found to be embarrassing even in the early days of their careers (such as Book Club, Poms, Last Vegas and other such embarrassments). In terms of its ambitions and willingness to give its superstar performers  the kind of challenging material that actually strives to make use of their talents, the closest thing that I can think of to compare it too in recent years is Grandma, the astounding 2015 comedy-drama starring Tomlin, in what remains her best screen performance to date, as a cynical grandmother who agrees to help her granddaughter get an abortion. That film was also written and directed by Weitz and it maintained a wonderful balance between hilarious and often genuinely outrageous comedy and dramatic moments that were heartfelt and occasionally bruising without ever devolving into sloppy sentimentality.

Like Grandma, Moving On uses a combination of wry comedy, hard-hitting drama and old-fashioned star power as a way to explore serious issues and, also like that film, it keeps viewers on their toes by always finding a new angle to approach the situations in any given scene. For example, there is a scene in which Claire and Evvie go shopping for the gun that they will use to kill Howard. With that setup, you might expect to find a lot of broad jokes about the ease with which they can get a weapon in this day and age. The scene is very funny but the humor is a lot more droll—the kind that you might have found in the films of the late Jonathan Demme—and gets even funnier when the two discover that it is actually harder to legally buy a gun than they have been led to realize. Another great scene is the one where Claire finally confronts Howard—her initial white-hot anger towards him mutates into horrified revulsion when she realizes that he has managed to comfortably compartmentalize the event that upended her life in a sequence that puts both the characters and the audience through the emotional wringer and then concludes with a hilarious and genuinely inspired laugh.

Fonda is amazing in that scene and indeed, this is easily the best performance that she has given in a movie since she returned to the screen nearly two decades ago. Throughout her illustrious career, she has always proven herself to be equally at home with both comedy and drama but this might be the best opportunity that she has ever had to demonstrate both of those skills in the same film. She lets you feel the torment that Claire is feeling without ever overplaying it and manages to deliver the big comedic moments so that they feel authentic and not just bits supplied by the screenplay. Obviously, she has great screen chemistry with Tomlin—they play off of each other with the skill of a classic comedy team—but she is equally strong with her other co-stars as well, especially Richard Roundtree, who turns up as the ex-husband that she divorced years ago as a result of the lingering and unspoken trauma regarding the incident with Howard. The two strike such sparks together in their scenes that they leaving you wanting to see them paired up again as quickly as possible and makes you wonder what kind of cinematic seismic shock might have resulted if someone had dared to make them an on-screen romantic pairing fifty years ago when she was the hottest star in Hollywood and he was the face of blaxploitation thanks to the success of Shaft.

If there is a flaw to the film, it is that Tomlin doesn’t quite register as strongly here as she did with her previous collaboration with Weitz. To be certain, that is probably to be expected since the main thrust of the narrative is Claire’s story. However, you just get the sense that more could have been done with her character and the one plot thread that does crop up to give her something to do—the friendship she develops with a young boy she meets in the nursing home and encourages his secret fondness for playing dress-up—is introduced, only to be oddly truncated. That said, she still gets a lot of strong and funny moments—her first appearance is especially hilarious—and her presence is invaluable here.

Moving On is the kind of film that could have gone so wrong in so many ways that it is almost a miracle that it turns out to be as good as it is. It is smart and funny throughout but it also has things to say about the corrosive power of emotional trauma that put more ostensibly serious-minded films to shame. It also serves as a reminder of the immense gifts of Fonda and Tomlin (not to mention McDowell and Roundtree) and shows us what they are capable of accomplishing when they are allowed to do more in a film than feign interest in the likes of Tom Brady or Guy Fieri.