“The Bucket List” is rated PG-13 for language, including a sexual reference.
Tempo grade: C
Film review by Rick Romancito, The Taos News
Is cancer something to laugh at? Well, maybe not at, but many patients and their doctors certainly do believe in the power of laughter. It helps to put things in perspective, focuses one’s energy on living, and illuminates the joy we should all be seeking for ourselves and those around us. I would love to say that Rob Reiner’s new film is a celebration of all that, but so much junk gets tossed in the road that avoiding it dilutes the message.
For instance, there is a nagging question that isn’t stated out loud, but is inherent through the picture: If you knew you were going to die within about a year or so, how would you spend your remaining time? For a lot of people, the answer might mean putting right some wrongs, spending days awash in the love of family and friends or finding peace. Unfortunately, though, far too many are burdened with skyrocketing medical bills and an inadequate health care system that makes putting off the inevitable seem almost cruel.
But in Reiner’s syrupy sentimental world, it means checking off items on a “bucket list.”
The film stars Morgan Freeman as a working class auto mechanic named Carter Chambers and Jack Nicholson as a cantankerous corporate billionaire named Edward Cole — who also happens to own the hospital in which both men find themselves after being diagnosed with cancer. How these men end up in the same hospital room together is one of the many contrivances we’re supposed to accept, posed by way of an opening sequence in which Edward declares with Scrooge-like pomposity that he doesn’t run health spas, he runs hospitals “two beds to a room, no exceptions.” But, if Ed’s so rich, why can’t he afford to be treated by the world’s top physicians in the best setting possible? The answer, of course, is that if he did these two guys wouldn’t meet and develop their elderly version of “bro-mance” with each other.
Back in the stone age, a freshman philosophy professor gave Carter’s class an assignment to list the things they’d like to do before they “kicked the bucket.” When Carter starts one, Edward, being the worldly, filthy rich, multi-divorced, no-strings-attached kind of guy that he is, asks why don’t they set about fulfilling it? So, they do. And then we, as the audience, are subjected to several strained sequences in which Edward and Carter travel the world doing and seeing all the cool things they always wanted.
Now, about those nagging questions.
Here’s a few more: If Ed’s so rich, why doesn’t he make sure to take along a highly paid doctor or at least a nurse to make sure the trip goes OK for them? And, why does the fulfillment of the bucket list seem so terribly trivial, especially when Carter’s got a wife, children and grandchildren wondering why grandpa took off with some rich stranger?
But, the worst has to do with the sadness that unintentionally lurks beneath the fantasy. Because Carter’s new friend is so wealthy, he has no worries about how all of this, even his health-care costs, will be paid. Which means any working class schmo like him in the audience who has ever been faced with the issues surrounding cancer and the crushing debt it creates, not to mention the inconvenience of organ failure, has to wonder about how flimsy it all seems. The structure of Reiner’s film then becomes its greatest hindrance and the seriousness it hopes to express lightly becomes the elephant in the room.
As a two-man show, the humor exchanged between Nicholson and Freeman is pretty choice at times, but it deserves a better vehicle than this broken down clunker with too many factory defects.
This review appears in the Thursday Jan. 17, 2008 edition of Tempo, the arts and entertainment magazine of The Taos News, Taos New Mexico, USA. Visit online www.taosnews.com.
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