The Leisure Seeker

By: Arlene Allen

The Leisure Seeker is actually a 2017 film that will just now be entered into wide release. Helen Mirren was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as Ella Spencer, the septuagenarian wife of John Spencer (Donald Sutherland). The older couple, one with Alzheimer’s and one with colon cancer, take their battered old camper, The Leisure Seeker, on one last road trip to escape from their overbearing son and absent daughter. They are hoping as well as hide from the medical drama that would kill them if they let it.  Ella, for one, is determined not to let it.

While the plot is rather predictable – you have a feeling, you know how the film has to end – the fun of getting to that point, the adventure, is what makes this film by Italian director Paolo Virzi so special. It’s also special because there just aren’t many film that focus on older adults and their love, especially a couple married for multiple decades. While this might make for limited audience appeal, I for one loved seeing a story like this, a celebration of marriage, with all of its ins and outs, highs and lows – one in which love wins. The Spencers are the old couple we all want to be.

John Spencer was a beloved high school English professor, but most of his memory is gone. It comes back in bright and brilliant spurts, but for the most part Ella has lost the man she loves. As for herself, she downplays her own illness so as not to worry him and to help him achieve his lifelong dream of seeing Hemingway’s House in Key West, Florida. They have many amusing adventures along the way with a couple of plot twists thrown in to keep things spicy such as John’s obsession with Ella’s first boyfriend Daniel.

The moments between the couple alternate between tender, infuriating and bizarre (which really is life).  Sutherland and Mirren, who first starred together twenty-seven years ago in Bethune: The Making of a Hero, play off each other so well that you really believe they are “old marrieds.” I’m willing to bet that some of their dialogue was improvised, especially Sutherland’s whose congenial and wacky memory slips are effortless.

I loved the subtlety in the story. I love the unspoken air of mystery when Ella and John run into one of John’s former students. When he asks about a friend of hers, you can see the student (Kirsty Mitchell) go distant, leaving you with the feeling that John forgot something important and possibly disturbing. I loved how when Ella shows John slides of their lives at various campgrounds they attract a wide array of interested onlookers. There are subtle hints about the lives of their son and daughter; especially the fact that their son is quite possibly gay.

Literature is one of the major focuses of the story and there’s a great scene in a restaurant where a bright waitress actually engages John on one of his booking ramblings. It makes his memory loss that much more poignant as we come face to face that he was once indeed a brilliant man. The film is itself “prose as poetry,” with its meaningful meditations on life and death. That it accomplishes this without being saccharin or sappy is another example of how wonderful this movie is.

The scenery in the film is beautiful with the cinematography capturing all the beauty of the east coast of the United States. It’s also one of the ways in which the couple looks back on their lives as they visit places they once brought their children to. What is unnecessary, though, is the misplaced political commentary. At one point the couple stumbles on a MAGA rally before the 2016 election with John wandering off and enjoying himself in the crowd as Ella reprimands him for doing so as he has been a “lifelong Democrat.” They also encounter a Hillary Clinton rally in a hotel. These bits were superfluous and had nothing to do with the overall plot of the movie.

I loved the music used in the movie with its mix of 60’s and 70’s classics. It adds to the couple’s ambience as a couple of old hippies. The final use of the Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” is guaranteed to wring hearts. I loved the couple’s appreciation of music. I loved the scenes of them dancing. I loved the scenes of them making love. Sometimes as a society we forget the elderly have feelings at all, much less those of love and sexual desire.

The film may have a limited audience draw with its two older stars and its storyline. I really wish this weren’t so because overall this is a beautiful film, celebrating topics we don’t see on the big screen very much. I highly recommend this film and if you have the chance to see it, take it.