Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, sharing a screen for the first time, play a long marriage so well that we forgave the film nearly everything. Nearly. Ernest Thompson’s script smooths every edge it finds, and the boy is a device.
Ernest Thompson adapted his own play, and its shape is still visible: one house, one summer, a few arrivals and departures. Norman Thayer Jr. is about to be eighty. He forgets the names of things, jokes about his own funeral and treats every visitor as an intruder to be tested. Ethel has been married to him for most of her life and finds him funny, which is the only explanation the film offers for why she stayed. Mark Rydell directs it as a summer comedy with a shadow across it, and while the two old people are alone together it is a good one, worth your evening. When the family arrives it gets softer, and it was already soft.
The reason to see it is Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, who had never shared a screen before and go about it as if they had been doing it for years. Fonda plays Norman low and flat, the voice barely moving, the cruelty arriving as a mild enquiry. Hepburn pitches Ethel a little higher than everything around her, talking to the loons and calling her husband an old poop, and the two fit. The scene that got us comes early. Ethel sends Norman into the woods for strawberries and he comes back without them, because he could not find a path he has walked for decades. She holds his head against her and calls him her knight in shining armour, and we were moved more than the line deserves, because Fonda plays the fear as embarrassment: a proud man admitting he was frightened by trees.
Billy Williams shoots the lake at dawn and dusk, mist on the water, the light low and gold, and it looks like the card you would send from there. Indoors he is plainer and better; the rooms are lit by windows and a lamp or two, and faces are allowed to be old. Stephen B. Grimes has filled the cottage with decades of clutter, hats on pegs, oars, photographs, a rack of fishing rods. Dorothy Jeakins puts Norman in a soft fishing hat and shapeless cardigans and Ethel in slacks and a man’s shirt. Dave Grusin’s piano theme is pretty, and it arrives whenever a feeling is on its way, so we are told about the feeling before the actors have produced it. Robert L. Wolfe cuts back to the loons more often than the loons can bear.
Then the visitors. Chelsea (Jane Fonda) arrives for the birthday with Bill Ray (Dabney Coleman), a dentist, and his son Billy (Doug McKeon), and the best-written scene outside the marriage follows almost at once. Norman, alone with Bill in the sitting room, needles him about the sleeping arrangements until Bill, who has been polite for ten minutes, stops. Coleman is excellent and Fonda plainly enjoys having someone to push against. Thompson can write a scene like that. He does not write many.
Billy is the problem. He is thirteen and talks the way a grown-up imagines a thirteen-year-old talks, all “suck face” and “bullshit”, and we winced at nearly every line he is given. He exists so that Norman can be gruff and then be kind, and the film hands the pair a boat, a rod and a legendary trout called Walter and lets the rest write itself. McKeon does what he can. A few of the fishing scenes work, because Fonda finds something real in a man deciding, late, to be curious about a child. Most of them are the film waiting for the parents to come back.
Jane Fonda plays the daughter who cannot please her father, opposite her own father, and everyone involved knew we would know that. It gives her scenes a charge the writing has not earned, and Thompson makes it worse by having Chelsea explain her grievances to her mother, in full sentences, in the kitchen. Hepburn answers them well. The second half has a scene we will not describe, and after it the family arranges itself into the shape a film like this requires. We did not believe the shape. We believed every word the two old people said to each other.
It was Henry Fonda’s last film, and he is as good in it as he ever was. Watch it for the two of them and be patient with the rest. At 109 minutes, the rest does not take long.
