Bucket List: A Hoary Story

Catching up on the movies we’d missed, we rented 2007’s hit, the Bucket List. My expectations were low. The tweet of the plot: two elderly guys with terminal cancer try to complete the list of things they’ve always wanted to do before they “kick the bucket”. The trailer assured us that there would be comic moments, as old men screamed with fright and exultation while they skydived or raced cars around the track.

With Oscar winners Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as the leads and Rob Reiner directing, the movie was assured to be more than a series of farcical moments. The first third of the film mostly takes place in the hospital room where the two men meet and establish their characters. The roles are cast as one might expect: Nicholson plays the ruthless, outspoken, anti-social, very successful businessman who’s a failure at personal relationships, while Freeman is the wise, loving, quiet, and religious man who is Nicholson’s polar opposite. After a few oil-and-water perfunctory conflicts, they are drawn together by their shared predicament and embark on their adventures.

The Bucket List isn’t all sweetness and light. Some harrowing scenes of the side-effects of chemotherapy clue us in that a pain-filled ending may be in store for our characters. And there is a lot of discussion on the meaning of life, death, family, religion, and all the other big topics. Rendered by these two experienced actors, the dialogue never gets too heavy and frequently engrosses.

The script contains some of the oldest themes in fiction: the odyssey in which the hero discovers that what he is looking for was at home all along and that knowledge is revealed from looking in more than from looking out. Familiarity yields dismissal, if not contempt, from young eyes; to those a bit older familiarity brings comfort. The movie wouldn’t have meant much to me 30 years ago, but now that I have a few years under my belt the characters’ experiences and especially their regrets strike a responsive chord. (Similarly, the language and ideas contained in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town are understood intellectually by schoolkids, but few of them identify emotionally with that play’s final act when the characters reflect upon their lives.)

The DVD contains interviews between Reiner and his two stars. The old pros talking about the fine points of movie-making are themselves worth the price of the rental.

The Bucket List is too sentimental for critics to call it a great movie, but I liked it. Indulge us, please: if women can have their chick flicks, we geezers can have our “hoary stories.”