Review: David Lowery's The Old Man and the Gun

By Taylor

Unjust laws deserve to be broken. The 2008 financial crisis, and as of 2018, what seems like the endless fall-out from it, prove that laws can be bent when a class of people exerts its influence. In 2008, the CEOs and other members of the world’s wealthiest class upended the global economy as well as thousands, if not millions, of lives in the process. Rather than facing the legal consequences of their actions, they got paid. They had their turn, and now it’s everyone else’s. After waiting around for a decade and getting nothing in return from lawmakers and so-called statesmen, the working class can’t afford to wait anymore. The time has come to take something, everything if it comes to it. The laws that help some and hurt others deserve to be broken, and culture is catching up with this idea. 

David Lowery’s The Old Man and the Gun is a folk tale for such times. It’s a heist movie that subverts the norms of heist movies, with a charming hero, conspicuously working-class, drawn out of time and projected on a screen for working class people to look up to and lean on for levity and a little inspiration. It’s a film for times of trouble, when even the laws of the land that the people love need to be broken for things to be made right again.

Robert Redford plays the titular Old Man, the charming Forrest Tucker, who escapes from San Quentin prison and rallies a gang of septuagenarians to commit a string of bank robberies across the United States. The excitement that these men generate is contagious. They rove the countryside, looting banks not for the money but for the fun of outsmarting and undoing the institutions of capital and the subjects of its law. Their honest intentions and subversive actions activate and excite ideas that have been stewing in the minds of many for years now: sometimes honest people have to commit crimes not because they’re criminal but because the laws that govern them are criminal and need to be broken, not reformed.

The age of these robbers is the first sign that the old order of things has broken down. In a reversal of roles, elderly men cross the country raising Hell while a series of young detectives follow close behind. Those that people expect to be apologists for the social order of capitalism rove the country undermining its systems, and those that people would expect to undermine it, the youth, end up tailing the elderly free spirits to contain their subversion. The set-up successfully surprises and amuses both the characters in the film and the audience watching it. 

However, some disgusting ideological vestiges permeate the delight of the action in The Old Man and the Gun. As detectives dredge up the past of Redford’s Forrest Tucker, they reveal that he abandoned a wife and child to pursue his lifestyle. Also, in his old age, he seems to fall for a woman played powerfully by Sissy Spacek, and despite the electric romance that both performances render on screen, Tucker abandons her, too, for the sake of a few more heists in his final years. The unaddressed disrespect for the female experience and the disregard for the burden of traditional female roles make for a sour backdrop to the sweetness with which Lowery depicts freedom. Of course, true freedom entails a degree of responsibility, particularly a responsibility to others that Tucker fails to accept time and time again, despite being depicted as its arbiter and ambassador. His insensitivity to genuinely oppressive cultural experiences tarnishes his charm. He’s not a perfect hero, but neither is this film perfect.

Additionally, the film gives far too much credit to police officers than is realistic or even thematically interesting. Lowery depicts them as restrained and at times friendly and honorable. They would be better depicted as brutal, not only to mirror their real-life counterparts, but to make a better foil for Robert Redford’s graceful and ever-charming Forrest Tucker. Part of the charm that Lowery threads throughout this film is the titular gun that Tucker seems reluctant to use. His reservations about hurting people make him a folk hero. He aims for freedom from the oppressive legal and social systems of capital around him, and he wants other people to be free like him. He’s a teacher and a leader. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. The restraint that Lowery grants the system undermines this theme and the justice of its hero.

The film staggers through some significant technical problems in addition to its thematic problems. For the first half of The Old Man and the Gun, the camerawork is good, the editing is decent, and it does a good enough job of honoring an older style of film without relying on its style to carry the production. However, the second half of the film suffers pacing errors. It sometimes slows to an anemic pace, and the editing entropies.

For all of its flaws, Redford and Spacek deliver truly magnetic performances in The Old Man and the Gun. Lowery makes interesting choices that pay off for the most part. The work that the cast and crew do together makes for an all-around interesting film. It may not be as good of a film as many critics may be hailing it to be, but it is good and its base message necessary. After the financial crisis of 2008, the world fell apart and never got better. Institutions of industry and finance recovered only because institutions of law intervened to resuscitate them. Like some sort of Hollywood monster, they rose from the dead. The working class registered the horror of the law and the monsters that it made. Some turned into monsters, others went looking for heroes, heroes like Forrest Tucker, the heroes that we need now.