Michael Radford’s remake of Marcos Carnevale’s 2005 Spanish language movie (Elsa y Fred) features Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer as the wrinkly romantics. It’s a crumblies’ rom-com; a tale so old that some of the clichés have since grown up and had clichés of their own. Give in to the charms of the two leads and it’s a warm, witty, joyous, life-affirming tale of two oldies finding love in their golden years.
While Fred is happy to read the obituaries, claiming he likes to catch up on his friends, top of Elsa’s bucket list is to dance in the same fountain in Rome as Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita. The two meet in their New Orleans apartment and, before you can say “I see exactly where this is heading” – it’s heading exactly where you guessed.
At the screening I sat in, audience members of a certain age laughed. They cried. Their hearts glowed at the sheer niceness of it all. Perhaps I’m just a grumpy, cynical, seen-it-all-before critic, but I barely got through it without screaming obscenities at the screen. Still, the not inconsiderable charisma of the lead actors helped me resist the urge to smother my eyeballs with salted popcorn. Not for me then, but for those who like their love stories simply told, with plenty of heart, from a script left to ripen like a well-aged cheese, Elsa & Fred will charm the incontinence pants off you.
