85 min | R | March 17, 2023 | Roadside Attractions
Claire flies to a funeral and tells the widower she plans to kill him. The reason is fifty years old and entirely justified. The movie around that promise never decides how serious it wants to be.
Claire arrives at the funeral of a childhood friend named Joyce. She walks up to Joyce’s widower Howard and tells him she intends to kill him. The reason traces back decades to something Howard did to her. Paul Weitz builds the film around that threat and the woman carrying it. Underneath the revenge premise sits a study of old wounds that never closed and a friendship that survived everything else. The film wants to be a dark comedy and a trauma drama at the same time.
Jane Fonda plays Claire with a flat, deliberate calm that makes the murder plot read as settled fact instead of fantasy. She delivers her threats the way other people confirm dinner plans. Lily Tomlin plays Evelyn, an old friend now living in a retirement home, with a loose profane energy that cuts against Fonda’s control. The two actors have spent decades building this rapport and it shows in the way they talk over each other and finish each other’s contempt. Malcolm McDowell plays Howard as a small, oblivious man, which denies Claire the satisfying villain her plan demands. Richard Roundtree plays Ralph, Claire’s ex-husband, with a warmth that opens the one genuinely tender stretch of the film.
Paul Weitz writes and directs, and the seams between his two modes stay visible the whole way through. The script stages a heavy revelation about the violence at its center and then cuts to a sitcom beat within minutes. The handheld camera stays close and unfussy, which fits the small scale but flattens the few moments that need room to breathe. Weitz underscores the comic stretches with a light, plucking acoustic line that undersells the darkness Claire actually carries. The retirement-home corridors and suburban interiors are drab by design, and the film never finds a visual idea beyond that drabness.
The film works whenever Fonda and Tomlin share a frame and stalls whenever they separate. Weitz has a real subject in the way harm done to women gets buried and forgotten by everyone but the woman it happened to. He keeps backing away from that subject to reach for a joke. The result is two great actors carrying a movie that cannot match their commitment. Claire wants a reckoning. The film hands her a shrug.