Life Is About the Journey, Not the Destination

Rating: 9/10 (21 November 2016)

Two aged friends spend some time together at a Swiss resort reminiscing about their pasts, regretting their mistakes, and pondering their creative careers in this thoughtful, quiet film about what it's like to look back on your life and quantify the results.
Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel are the friends, and both give marvelous performances, Caine especially in the role of a famed composer who is confronted with the life (a wife and daughter, played in a characteristically over-acted performance by Rachel Weisz) that he set aside to focus on his career. Paul Dano is a young film actor who's preparing for a role as Hitler, while Jane Fonda makes a late-act appearance as a Hollywood grande dame and who for one lengthy scene carries the movie away with her.
"Youth" is beautifully shot, one striking composition following another, and it unfolds with an air of stately grace. If I had been in a different mood when I saw it, I might have found that air a bit suffocating and overly austere, but as it is I thought it was the perfect matching of tone and subject matter.
"Youth" is less about what its various characters and sub-plots add up to than it is individual moments and how they add up to what we think of as life. As I get older myself, I realize that life isn't about achieving some defined goal -- those who make it so are bound to look back with a feeling of disappointment, either because that goal will never be achieved or because it proves to be not very satisfying when it is. Instead, life is a collection of little moments along the way, and what you do with them -- enjoy them, learn from them, try not to repeat them -- is what separates those who find happiness (or at least contentment) from those who do not.
Grade: A