Dark Goddess Review: "Youth"

Now for something a little different. . .

I love movies, although we don’t go out to many, choosing instead to see them from the comfort of our favorite chairs. But sometimes we still do, and I try to keep an eye out for the entertainment industry’s attempts to attract my dollars with age-appropriate productions, something for the booming boomer trade. Besides, these make a nice contrast with the superhero fare I consume with my grandson and granddaughter. So last weekend Silver Fox and I went to see Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth.

Such a great cast, I was hoping for some real entertainment, insider jokes, witty repartee, shared references. What I found put me off my feed, so to speak – there is nothing light about this movie. In fact, it had a Felliniesque lugubrious quality that slithered its way through a lot of symbolism and possibly metaphorical dialogue I didn’t understand to an ambiguous if not downright depressing ending. I came away not liking any of the characters and wishing we had chosen something else.

We talked about it though, Silver Fox and I. In the car on the way home, again at dinner, again the next day, and I have to say that it did spark a lot of speculation – at least it is speculation on MY part. I have concluded from how much better Silver Fox related that Youth is a dick-flic, and no wonder I was getting nowhere with it. “So, those references to first bike rides, was that a metaphor for getting laid?” “Did they really not remember anything about their parents or is that a denial of emotions, a macho that keeps on giving”? Whatever.

The senior cast is, in spite of what I felt was useless and inane dialogue, superb.

Harvey Keitel is the most likeable of the warhorses, a man coming to his end doing what he loves, writing a successful screenplay, acolytes at his beck and call; and Keitel charms even if he might be just a tetch shallow.

Michael Caine, Keitel’s oldest and best friend, no longer will do what he loves - composing and conducting music, thinks too much, and says too little. It is difficult to get a take on his character, even presented through the eyes of his sometimes-bitter daughter, played by Rachel Weisz. Children never get their parents. Like Cannery Row’s lonely tanked octopi, Caine is “moody, very moody.”

Jane Fonda’s movie queen, the much-heralded Brenda, appears in only one scene, but she steals it and runs as the brassiest bottle-blond bitch of a working woman one could possibly devise.

Yay Jane!

To my chic-flic senses,  the only normal person in the echoing vastness of this Swiss spa setting is the young actor, played by Paul Dano. He is there on a stealth mission to suss out the essence of life from the geezers, and I think he does, abandoning the Hitler role he intended to create for another, healthier approach to his life’s work. Dano’s was the only character I liked, including the other youthful females, who were either irritatingly whiny or without any voice at all – floating in that sea of symbolism that I didn’t get.

Silver Fox related better to the geezers. In fact, he has decided that Youth is a well-crafted and serious look at getting old, a treatise on the value of emotion and the disposition of loss. And perhaps it is.  He would give it more stars than I do. As always and shall ever be, different strokes for different folks. Amen.