Film Journal January 2018

A somewhat generic but mostly agreeable
road-trip movie about a long-married couple
(Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren) on
their final vacation.
Mounting predictability and a few credibilityfree
scenes notwithstanding, Paolo Virzi’s The
Leisure Seeker is an engaging road-trip movie
about two still-ambulatory seniors who are
nonetheless circling the drain. It’s John and
Ella Spencer’s (Donald Sutherland and Helen
Mirren) final vacation in their beloved 1975
Winnebago, which they’ve dubbed “the leisure
seeker.”
Deterioration, death, dying and “choosing”
how one dies—hot-button issue, that
one—are the thematic motifs coupled
with gentle life-affirming comedy and, yes,
romance. After 60 years of marriage, the
Spencers continue to be in love and are more
committed to each other than ever.
Loosely adapted from Michael Zadoorian’s
highly readable, entertaining yet poignant
novel, The Leisure Seeker recounts the Spencers’
adventures on that fateful expedition as
they travel down the East Coast along Route
1 from their home in Wellesley, Mass., to Key
West, Florida, where John, a retired English
professor and Hemingway authority, will visit
the iconic writer’s stomping ground. While
John enjoys moments of astonishing lucidity—he
knowledgeably discusses lofty literary
topics, quoting verbatim from one source or
another—he’s suffering from dementia; much
of the time he’s confused, forgetful and childlike
(in some ways the male counterpart to
Alice Howland in Still Alice).
Ella, his junior by at least ten years, is
mentally intact though gravely ill. She’s often
in pain, popping pills, and sports a wig. It
doesn’t take too much insight to surmise she
has cancer. (This movie has its share of suds.)
Still, for the most part she is cheerful and
relentlessly chatty, offering personal tidbits (in
an inconsistent Southern accent) to anyone
she encounters. When she’s not prattling away
to strangers, she’s John’s caretaker and guiding
force. In the novel, she’s the narrator.
The Spencers have two grown children,
the laid-back Jane (Janel Moloney) and the
frenetic Will (Christian McKay), the latter
spinning his wheels at what he views as an
imprudent misstep on the part of his parents.
But the Spencers refuse to be caged in by
their children, doctors or anyone else. They’ve
upped and left without telling a soul. This is
yet another Virzi testimonial to freedom, a
trope he sentimentally dramatized in his film
Like Crazy, about two mental patients who
escape an asylum and take to the road.
Along the way, the Spencers make stops
at diners, historic theme parks and campsites
where nightly Ella sets up a slide show,
projecting pictures of their earlier vacations
onto a screen in an effort to jog John’s
failing memory. Their excursion includes an
encounter with thugs who hold them up (the
confrontation has become de rigueur in roadtrip
pics), and in another scene Ella slips onto
the floor, John falls on top of her and both are
immobilized. The accident telegraphs their dilapidation
and interdependence. Indeed, their
disintegration forges a greater bond between
them. The film successfully captures their
intimacy on many fronts.
Still, festering wounds resurface and
secrets are exposed. The genre has come to
demand these revelations, and here they’re
particularly jarring. In his befuddlement John
can’t stop harping on Ella’s first boyfriend, Dan
Coleman, whom he’s convinced she’s had an
ongoing affair with throughout their marriage.
To put that notion to rest, Ella tracks down
Dan in a nursing home where he now resides.
She hasn’t seen the man in 60-plus years,
yet sets out to visit him with John in tow.
Dan (Dick Gregory in his final role) is now
wheelchair-bound and has no recollection of
who she is. Everything about the section is
fakery beyond redemption, short of Gregory’s
fine performance
Also out of left field and equally contrived,
at one point John confuses Ella for a neighbor
with whom he had a two-year sexual relationship
years earlier. Hallucinating, he spills all!
Naturally, Ella was clueless and now, in an
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