Observations on Growing Old
Adam (William Hurt) and Mary (Isabella Rossellini) have been married for 30 years and as they head towards retirement find themselves struggling to come to terms with growing old. For Adam, a successful architect, the offer of designing a home for the aged repulses him as does his wife installing safety devices in the bathroom and bringing home a phone with big buttons on. Whilst Mary who accepts certain aspects of getting old finds her health not what it once was as even walking up a flight of stairs leaves breathless but still feeling indignant when someone offers her their seat on the bus.
I think there was a good idea behind "Late Bloomers", in fact having watched other movies which deal with the subject of ageing and the struggles people face as the wrinkles appear and so on I know this could have been a good movie. Sadly something went a miss and whilst sporadically entertaining it never quite manages to be consistent with it, making it an incredibly uneven movie almost to the point of being a movie of scene ideas such as when Mary at the health club unbuttons her top and feels invisible as no one notices her.
This feeling of being uneven really comes across in the acting with both William Hurt and Isabella Rossellini doing a solid job of making their characters easy to understand and like despite there not being a great deal of flow to things. But then you get the supporting performances and there are a lot of familiar faces in this but there characters seem to be there to be part of a scene idea rather than to have a bigger part to play.
What this all boils down to is that "Late Bloomers" has a lot of fun ideas when it comes to dealing with the subject of ageing and that shows in the various scene ideas from Mary angered by a young man giving up his seat on the bus for her to Adam being mistaken for a resident of an old people's home. But the whole thing struggles to come together in a flowing narrative and often ends up more like a lot of scene ideas rather than a movie with a beginning, middle and end.
