Geezer travelogue

In a partial (but only partial) return to form, Rob Reiner has made a salt-and-pepper buddy picture-cum-comedy of sentimental uplift about two old men dying of cancer. The Bucket List is a vehicle for two big box office Hollywood seventy-year-olds, Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. The contrasts between their on screen characters are neat enough to provide some promise of action. Edward Cole (Nicholson) is a sour divorcée with megabucks: he owns the hospital that treats him and a bunch more. According to a carefully stressed regulation that his system puts two patients to a room in every one of his institutions no matter what, he's assigned to a bed next to Carter Chambers (Freeman), a garage mechanic with a calm, forgiving manner and one quirk: he's a fact nut who loves to match wits with the contestants on TV's "Jeopardy" and can't stop reciting nuggets of information in between broadcasts. Middle class enough for his two sons to have become professional men, he has a fretful wife who's a longtime nurse. Cole's main associate seems to be a factotum he addresses abusively. Cole's an angry, acid dude whose long-gone wives are now merely the subject of innuendos. Can we guess the script was penned with these actors in mind? Cole and Chambers of course soon discover a bond that transcends their differences: their imminent mortality.

A list of things to do before you die is a standard self-help motivational gimmick to lead one to a fuller life. Only this time, before you die isn’t just a manner of thinking. After some get-acquainted scenes in the hospital room that establish these guys are actually sick (a point often neglected in the rest of the action), Cole and Chambers are informed of the same prognosis: six months to a year. The "bucket list" is Chambers’ idea, but it’s Cole's prodding and his money that lead the two men to embark on the project of doing the stuff on the list, plus some more items Cole adds. Even kissing a beautiful woman turns out to be an expensive proposition. Implied axiom: achieving your dreams is a whole lot easier and faster if you happen to be supplied with big bucks and deprived of emotional ties.

Cole won’t reveal how much he’s got, but it's obviously plenty. The sudden buddies fly round the world in a super-posh private plane--or rather, a movie set made to resemble the interior of one. (The movie cuts corners on locations.) Along goes Cole’s abused factotum, but not Chambers’ former nurse wife, and there’s a problem. Cole is virtually unattached. Chambers has a whole big family he’s leaving behind to go on this spree that includes scenes (most of them obviously faked) that feature the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the French Riviera, and the Himalayas. It starts off with a comical jump from a plane, each geezer tied to a handler, and another sequence where they mess up two racing cars. They could have died right there but both are saved to expire back in the hospital, though we don’t observe that, only a cute joint interment, in an illegal mountain location, of their twin ashes in matching Chock Full o'Nuts coffee cans. What never gets quite resolved is the question why this tripping was really better than spending quality time with the people in your life, or, for Cole, performing some acts of human kindness for a change. He does, but they're rushed in at the end so fast we barely see them happening.

Of course Freeman and Nicholson are pros, and they know how to deliver their lines with good timing and rhythm. But the material is too superficial to provide them with depth of character or a rounded relationship. It's all just banter, really--as if friendship were a matter of trading one-liners (a venerable idea in Hollywood).

If any wisdom comes out of all this, it eludes me. Well, there are a few thoughts about the process of dying . The Kubler-Ross grief cycle is even mentioned: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance--it's another of Chambers' factoids. Chambers really does know some interesting stuff, and whenever the dialog goes dead, out comes some more. One nugget finally helps the pair live their "bucket list" dream of laughing till they cry. That’s a cheapie, and a whole lot easier than climbing the Himalayas: but with Cole’s money, they could always get a helicopter to drop them up there. Chambers also gets to have a big Thanksgiving dinner with his Hollywood-perfect extended family, and Jack, AKA Cole, gets to deliver a weepy eulogy of his three-month pal, who kicks the bucket first, while Chambers, as in the current romantic tear-jerker P.S. I Love You, leaves behind a letter that persuades Cole to renew some of his own family ties. Hooray and boo-hoo.

The faults of this movie are many. The travel sequences are hasty as well as inauthentic, and the "bucket list" itself--not arranged in any order, and barely glimpsed--isn't given the weight it needs to show why two dying men would want to spend a good slice of their last days following it. Apart the fact that the connection of the two men is forced and unlikely, each experience is too quickly dropped to go on to the next. Unexamined life? You've got it. The implication that dreams cost lots of money would be pernicious if it were not so silly and obvious. To go from the shallow to the profound, another treatment of the theme of what to do before you die is Kurosawa's Ikiru. In that film, Mr. Watanabe's best solution turns out to be the one most ready to hand. Nothing comes out of The Bucket List's travelogue but some hasty male bonding. It's never clear what these guys have in common other than the dialog written for them, the gags and the oddball facts. Even from what's obviously just an over-promoted Christmas comedy, we deserve better.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.