It s short, sweet, neatly crafted, and fetchingly acted by Paul Newman, who keeps getting better as he gets older, and Linda Fiorentino, the naughty star of The Last Seduction , who in a just world would be very, very famous. Nothing too terribly challenging there, and the ending is predictably happy, but few bothered to see it. Never mind that the old gent turns out to be as fast on his feet as ever. Baby boomers just don t want to think about nursing homes at all . End of story.
Serious movies tell a different kind of story.
Alas, most people don t go to movies to see the truth. They want to be reassured, not challenged. This isn t to say that reassuring films cannot be artful to be a Christian is to believe in happy endings but nothing is easy in the modern world, a sorrowful fact that serious art, being true, cannot help but reflect. The Sixth Sense, Three Kings, and Topsy-Turvy. Some were more serious than others, but all had something worthwhile to say about modern life and said it intelligently and artfully.