There are dead zones of un-hire-ability that actors need to navigate in order to extend a career that’s inherently, constantly in jeopardy of drying up and blowing away. For example, a particularly difficult age is 28: too old to be the teen heartthrob, but too young to be the young dad.
Old age of course is the mother of all dead zones for actors of both genders, albeit much worse for women. Hollywood is ageist only if it can’t figure out a way to make money off aging actors, and so former leading men have to figure out how to repackage themselves. Liam Neeson did it by becoming an aging action star in “Taken”; Tommy Lee Jones did the same as U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard in “The Fugitive.”
Old Spy
Bridges, 72, plays Dan Chase, whom we first meet during a night of frequently interrupted sleep, featuring both enlarged prostate-generated bathroom trips and flashback nightmares about his deceased wife.Relating this to his daughter Angela (Alia Shawkat) on the phone, she fondly recalls her youth, when it seemed that no one could ever hurt him. “Where did that guy go?” she wonders. “You weren’t very bright as a kid,” he jokingly replies. “I just got good at lying to you.”
Although a checkup results in a clean bill of health, his gut instinct regarding his repeatedly disturbed sleep causes him to eventually jury-rig a homemade tripwire from some fishing line and empty tin cans, which, along with his two Rottweilers Dave and Carol, catches a man with a gun sneaking into his house. Now Dan may be old, but Dan knows jiujitsu, and Dan know guns, and forthwith dispatches the intruder with a choke and a bullet.
Dan tells Angela to prepare for a lengthy period of radio silence—he needs to hole up someplace for a while, which causes her anguish. But Dan can’t manage to stay off the phone with her for long, and while he thought he was talking to her on an untraceable burner phone, he soon gets a call from former military teammate-turned-nemesis Harold Harper (John Lithgow), the assistant director for FBI counterintelligence.
Harper’s been called out of retirement specifically to deal with Dan’s situation. Harper chastises Dan for being so decrepit as to forget to hide a hitman’s silencer.
The two old warriors are clueless as to why Dan is suddenly a subject of interest again (not entirely clueless). But Harper also wants their shared past to stay buried. Harper’s willing to look the other way while Dan exits stage left, but warns Dan that he has no idea how much the spy game has evolved. He suggests Dan simply disappear and let his daughter go forever.
Dan, again, wants no part of that. He threatens Harper that he’ll sing and inculpate him, to which the unfazed Harper replies, “I’ve got 10,000 agents and a billion-dollar budget to make up for whatever edge I’ve lost—what do you have?”
The Good Stuff
This dude may be grizzled, but he’s also deadly. That’s the satisfying hook that makes this show such an invigorating and surprising thriller. That, plus the mysterious dynamic between these two national-treasure-status American actors. Bridges’s and Lithgow’s cat-and-mouse game is highly reminiscent of Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in “The Fugitive.”The difference from “The Fugitive” is that “The Old Man” is more complicated. Harrison Ford’s character, Dr. Richard Kimble, was a moral titan, whereas it’s not entirely clear whether Dan Chase is a hero or a villain. It’s OK, because we always enjoy an old man who’s still very much a lethal force of nature not to be messed with.
The Hostage Has Teeth
Chase is also chivalrous to Zoe (Amy Brenneman), an older, bitter, and initially prickly divorced woman into whose guesthouse Chase moves after shooting the would-be hit man. Dan makes Zoe food a couple of times to help calm her nerves and, after watching this strapping older man with excellent hair act dad-like and chef-like in her kitchen with a cozy air of caretaking, Zoe asks Dan on a date. It may also be the case that he thusly, calculatedly, schmoozed her into letting go of her guest-deal-breaker of no dogs allowed.But Brenneman’s Zoe’s sudden refusal of victimhood is startling. She pulls a legal fast one that Dan didn’t see coming, and says, “I want to amount to more than just a complication in your story.”
T-Bone Burnett, who produced “Crazy Heart” and the music for Bridge’s character Bad Blake therein, is also heavily on the soundtrack for “The Old Man,” enhancing what is already absorbing, addictive viewing.
But again, it’s the dynamic of Harper’s effectiveness (due to extensive FBI resources) being undercut by his ambivalence about letting skeletons out of the closet, versus Chase’s somewhat deteriorated but still highly uncanny instincts for self-preservation, that provides a delicious tension.
