TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81.59

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 10KB | 192 lines

                                                                                November 16, 1981

CINEMA

At Last, Kate and Hank!


On Golden Pond burnishes age with the art of Hepburn and Fonda


It begins with images of serenity; wild flowers gently stirring
in an almost imperceptible spring breeze; loons, bright-eyed
and sleek, afloat on untroubled waters; the lake itself
shimmering in the backlight of a dying sun. The first glimpses
of Golden Pond are washed with the kind of burnished light that
colors our recollections of better places and better times past.

The first glimpses of the aged couple who are reopening their
comfortable old summer house are suffused with a similar light,
though that is more a trick of the moviegoer's memory than of
the cinematographer's art. For Katharine Hepburn and Henry
Fonda arrive in On Golden Pond bearing with them not merely
their vacation baggage but a montage of beloved images assembled
from a combined 95 years of motion picture acting in 129
features, not to mention uncounted stage and television
appearances.

Spunky Kate and Honest Hank!  If people were allowed to vote on
such matters, the pair would probably be grandparents to an
entire nation, since they are among the very few movie stars who
have gone on working while four or five movie generations have
grown up. By this time, their personal crotchets and graces,
the events in the chronicle of their lives, have merged in the
public mind with fragments from all those movies. Down the long
corridor of the years, it seems we have encountered them at
every turning. When they were young they gave lessons in
romance; in middle age they taught steadfastness and honor; now
it seems not only right but almost inevitable that they should
come together--astonishingly-- for the first time, to share some
of the pains and puzzlements of age with us.

It comes as a gift that the vehicle is literately written by
Ernest Thompson and sensitively directed by Mark Rydell. On
Golden Pond is a mature movie, and for the first time in years
that does not make it an oddity. The youth audience the film
industry has been wooing for more than a decade is growing up.
According to an industry source, 43% of those Americans who
regularly go to movies are now over 29 (only 25% were in that
age group eight year ago). Very few major movies aimed at
adolescents are being released this holiday season. Instead,
the next weeks will offer Ragtime, an adaptation of E.L.
Doctorow's panoramic vision of turn-of-the-century America;
Reds, Warren Beatty's life of Revolutionary John Reed; Absence
of Malice, a serious examination of journalistic ethics; and
Whose Life Is It Anyway?, which is about euthanasia. Even the
new John Belushi/Dan Akroyd feature is far from Animal House;
it ia an adaptation of Thomas Berger's Neighbors, a farcically
structured but coruscating novel about friendship. As if to
stress the point, such legendary figures as James Cagney and
Fred Astaire will be back on-screen before the year turns.

In any season, On Golden Pond would be welcome. Like last
year's Ordinary People, the film addresses itself seriously and
intelligently, without sermon or sociology, to an inescapable
human issue; in this case, finding a decent ending for a life.
By inviting audiences to contemplate the struggle of two
attractively idiosyncratic old parties coming to terms with
mortality. On Golden Pond gently requires them to confront that
same inevitability in themselves. In short, those serene images
of the film's opening are deceptive; age is not entirely golden
on Golden Pond; dark currents flow just beneath its surface.

As the lives of Norman Thayer Jr. and his wife Ethel unfold, it
becomes apparent that they have been spared none of the
vicissitudes of aging except poverty. He is a retired
professor, and there is obviously good breeding and a bit of
money in their backgrounds. But the isolation of old age is
upon them. No close friends are left on the pond; their only
child Chelsea has been estranged from her father since childhood
and now almost never comes home. Divorced, childless, she is
living the worrisome ad hoc life of the fortyish woman who is
still trying to find herself. The promise of a visit from her
before the summer ends does not cheer Norman.

But then, it seems, nothing could. He suffers from angina; he
suffers from the thought of his approaching 80th birthday that
is to be the occasion for Chelsea's return; he suffers from a
constant preoccupation with death. "Don't you have anything
else to think about?" his wife inquires. "Nothing quite as
interesting," he answers. There is a bitterness as well as wit
in that reply, as there is in most of Norman's sinker-ball
deliveries. But bitter or not, jokes are Norman's last line of
defense, for if he is afraid of dying, he also dreads living
mentally and physically diminished. He can't remember
things--the faces in an old photograph near the phone or, for
that matter, why he picked up the phone in the first place. He
can no longer do simple chores--can't repair the screen door,
can't start a fire in the fireplace without imperiling the
house. On day Ethel, seeking to get him stirring, sends him out
to pick berries. He becomes confused, can't recall the turns
in the road, and stumbles home in shame. In one of the film's
most moving moments, he confesses to Ethel why he returned so
quickly:  "I was scared to death--that's why I came running
back. To see your pretty face, to feel safe."

In his wife's deliberately overstated response--she insists he
is still her "knight in shining armor"--there is irony. For as
Norman's apologist and mediator between him and his daughter,
him and the world, she has become the defender of his faltering
faith in himself and the emotional stability of their narrowing
world.

Soon Ethel is harder at work than usual as a go-between.
Chelsea arrives with her new lover, Bill (well played by Dabney
Coleman), a dentist whose laid-back manner does not hide a will
hard as a platinum inlay. Then there is his 13-year-old son,
Billy (Doug McKeon, who gets the bravado, vulnerability and
candor of adolescence just right). He is toughing out a feeling
that since Mom and Dad are divorced he is essentially homeless,
that the idea of dumping him with the old folks while Dad and
Chelsea go to Europe is desertion.

Things do not begin promisingly. Norman will still not concede
his daughter is an adult ("Look at this fat little girl" is his
greeting), and soon he is hectoring Bill about where he and
Chelsea will sleep ("You could have the room where I first
violated Ethel"). As for Billy, he is wary, always ready to
sulk or run. But there are possibilities in the situation. It
could break Norman's habit of turning ever more tightly in on
himself, and teach Billy his conviction that no one is
interested in him is wrong. If an old man starts to show a
young man the ropes (or at least how to handle a fishing line),
perhaps Norman will see he still has useful work to perform as
a teacher. Perhaps Billy will see that even if affection is
crankily stated, it is still affection, and that he is worthy
of it.

The psychology may be taken a little too straight out of Erik
Erikson, or even Gail Sheehy, and the plot verges on the
melodramatic (it takes a boating accident to seal the bargain
of friendship between the generations). But emotionally On
Golden Pond is not less valid for being something of a cliche.
Anyway, the characters are so strong that the piece does not
play as a cliche. Hepburn, for example, may have a less chewy
part than has Fonda, but the briskness of her manner, her
well-justified image as a no-nonsense individualist who is
nevertheless a good sport, serve her wonderfully. There is a
vivifying touch of tension between an actress who was a
liberated woman before the movement was born and her role as
traditional wife and mother.

But Golden Pond finally belongs to Henry Fonda, who has had to
wait until the end of his life for the part of his life. As
Norman he is able to bring together, in a single character, the
two main strands of his talent. The old gentleman's character
is grounded on the main line of Fonda's star career. The
fundamental decency and intelligence that were basic to the
likes of Tom Joad and Mr. Roberts still infuse his presence.
Indeed, so powerful has that image been that one sometimes
forgets how splendid he has been as a character actor. The
military martinet of Fort Apache, the cold-eyed outlaw of Once
Upon a Time in the West, even the hilariously befuddled
herpetologist "Hopsy" Pike of The Lady Eve--they all light up
in one's memory as the spirit that animated them flashes in
Fonda's eyes. Without raising his voice he gives a bravura
performance as he moves from depressed withdrawal to momentary
rages, from the struggle to express affection to the struggle
not to express it, lest it be mistaken for weakness.

When Chelsea reappears, the old man even manages a tentative
truce, acceptance of the sort Ethel has been struggling to bring
about. Whether that truce signals a real reconciliation the
movie does not definitively promise. But if it refuses to go
for a big, emotional finish that would leave its audience awash
in grateful tears, neither does it leave them without hope.

With all their visitors departed, the last bags and boxes
stowed in the station wagon. Norman and Ethel go down to the
pond to say goodbye to the loons that have been their summer
companions. The bird family turns out to be diminished
too--just the mother and father are left. Fonda eyes them and
in the wry, dry voice that has drawled through our consciousness
for almost half a century, speaks a kind of generational
epitaph, weary but accepting. "Babies are all grown up . . . and
moved to Los Angeles or somewhere."

The spirit in which he speaks--realistic, humorous, but with
feeling--is precisely what claims one's respect for On Golden
Pond. When it sometimes seems the whole society has spiritually
decamped for Tinseltown, the movie offers the hope that people
can come home again--at least for a visit.


--By Richard Schickel