‘The Leisure Seeker’ Film Review: Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland Highlight Touching Road Movie
Italian director Paolo Virzi delivers a bittersweet ode to things that are slipping away for people and for a country
Steve Pond | March 7, 2018 @ 2:30 PM
Last Updated: March 7, 2018 @ 2:34 PM
AWARDS BEAT
TIFF
An American road movie made by an Italian director with Canadian and British stars, “The Leisure Seeker” is a gentle but pointed lament for things that are lost and things that are fading, be they personal memories or a national sense of community.
The film, which premiered last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, takes director Paolo Virzi down the east coast of the U.S., as stars Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren drive a battered 1975 Winnebago (which she’s dubbed “the Leisure Seeker”) from their home in Massachusetts to Ernest Hemingway’s house in the Florida Keys.
It is in parts a light, amusing road trip even as it deals with heavy themes — Sutherland’s character, John, is suffering from dementia that finds him slipping between clarity and complete forgetfulness, while Mirren’s Elle has her own looming health problems.
For a while, those troubles are the nagging darkness underneath an enjoyable lark of a trip: John, a former college professor, regales a waitress with textual analysis of Hemingway, while Elle foils a stick-up attempt because, let’s face it, nobody messes with Helen Mirren.
But their nightly campground slide shows, which Elle uses to jog John’s memories, become more bittersweet and painful, and the inexorable sense of where this trip is heading grows more pronounced as the film progresses.
Sutherland, calibrating the degrees of dementia in a quietly wrenching performance, and Mirren, who wears a happy mask that never really hides the physical and mental anguish beneath, make this a touching personal story of a couple so close that they can’t even bear to check into a hotel room with twin beds.
But Virzi is after a bigger story, too: There’s a reason why the first thing we hear in the film is Carole King singing “It’s Too Late” (“something inside has died … and I just can’t fake it”) and the second thing is a radio broadcast of Donald Trump promising, “America is back.”
Well, no it’s not, at least not in “The Leisure Seeker.” This may not be as incisive a look at American society as Virzi’s “Human Capital” was about the state of Italy, but it’s an effective tale of how things are slipping away around us. Hemingway’s lair is now a party house, petty thieves use bad grammar and that big “Make America Great Again” rally only really sounds enticing if you’ve lost any sense of history.
Smartly, though, the big picture is really just a sidelight in “The Leisure Seeker.” The heart of Virzi’s film is the palpable bond between these two people (and these two gifted actors), and their journey through decades of memories, loves and regrets.
12 Hottest TIFF Movies for Sale, From 'Hostiles' to Tonya Harding Drama (Photos)
Though it's not as robust as the annual Sundance Film Festival market or populous as Cannes' Marche du Film, TIFF is a pedigreed springboard for solid indies. Here are this year's hottest films for sale.
"I, Tonya" [UTA / CAA / Miramax] Arguably the hottest title for sale at TIFF 2017, producer-star dynamo Margot Robbie offers up a drama about U.S. Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding and her notorious involvement in the beating of teammate Nancy Kerrigan before the 1994 Olympics. Buyers are dying to see this one.
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"The Children Act" [CAA / FilmNation] Richard Eyre’s drama has an attractive cast in the firebrand Emma Thompson (who wouldn’t buy this movie simply for the joy of watching her promote it?) and Stanley Tucci, reunited after the recent box office smash “Beauty and the Beast.” The film is an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s same-named novel, about a British judge asked to intervene when a minor refuses a blood transfusion over his religious beliefs.
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"The Cured" [WME] High-brow horror is hard to do, but a category critics and select audiences adore for delivering chills without the tackier conventions of the genre. “The Cured” would certainly check that box, thanks to a clever and unsettling premise: A portion of the population became zombies but were cured. They suffer extreme judgment in a recovering society for, well, eating other people.
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"Hostiles" [CAA / WME] Christian Bale reunites with his "Out of the Furnace" director Scott Cooper for this gritty Western -- already putting Bale in the Oscar conversation after an earlier festival debut. Rosamund Pike, Ben Foster and Jesse Plemmons co-star.
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"Submergence" [UTA] Perhaps the dreamiest trio at TIFF, auteur Wim Wenders will offer up a romance between Alicia Vikander and James McAvoy. The former plays a deep-sea researcher, the latter a water engineer, attempting to connect across continents and oceans while a civil war rages.
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"Mom and Dad" [CAA / XYZ] Giving a fabulous middle finger to helicopter parents, Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair star in writer-director Brian Taylor's super-dark comedy about a 24-hour hysteria that sees parents attempt violence against their own children.
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"Papillon" [CAA] Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek star in a remake of the 1973 thriller that starred Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman -- where two men plot an escape from a prison island.
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"Three Christs" [CAA / Highland Film Group] Jon Avnet sets about the ambitious task of creating both a black comedy and a film that gets mental illness right. Richard Gere stars as a doctor treating three paranoid schizophrenics (Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins, Bradley Whitford) who all believe they are Jesus Christ.
TIFF
"My Days of Mercy" [UTA / WME] This politically charged gay love story pits Kate Mara and Ellen Page against each other on two sides of a capital punishment debate. It also brings them together romantically. Trivia: The official TIFF festival guide labels Page a "powerhouse Canadian," which just makes us smile.
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"Eating Animals" [CAA] Natalie Portman produces this well-received doc about the horrors of meat consumption based on a memoir by Jonathan Safran Foer.
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"Marrowbone" [CAA / Lionsgate] Screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez makes his directorial debut in a buzzy, supernatural thriller about four children orphaned by the loss of their mother. The lost brood take refuge in an abandoned house only to find sinister forces lurking there.
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"Woman Walks Ahead" [CAA] Jessica Chastain and Michael Greyeyes lead this substantive drama about New York artist Catherine Weldon, who became the trusted confidante of legendary Sioux chief Sitting Bull.
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Toronto film market has awards bait, high-brow horror and sweaty Charlie Hunnam
Though it's not as robust as the annual Sundance Film Festival market or populous as Cannes' Marche du Film, TIFF is a pedigreed springboard for solid indies. Here are this year's hottest films for sale.