Old Men Forget

Once, when men got old, they got old, and there was no pretending otherwise. “An aged man,” wrote Yeats, “is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.”

Yeats wrote those lines not all that long ago in historical terms, in 1928, and the image is a precise one, a photorealist portrait in words. But then came facelifts, and Botox, and hair implants, and hair extensions. Nowhere are these efforts to halt the ravages of time on the human body more in evidence than in show business.

Female performers who deploy these subterfuges are instantly recognizable, for it creates a somewhat off-kilter impression, no matter their age–from 41-year-old Nicole Kidman to Barbara Walters, pushing 80. For some strange reason, the same is not really true for most of the male actors who indulge in them. Somehow, the men seem to freeze in time more easily in some indeterminate late-40s to early-50s zone. Only the occasional glimpse of a liver-spotted hand or the mottled skin of an upper arm shatters the illusion.

And yet, just because a male actor’s hair is full and only partly gray and his skin is taut doesn’t mean he is convincing when he plays a role meant for someone 20 years younger. The cosmetic reduction of age is truly only skin deep. His voice may be a tad too hollow; his gait may more closely resemble a “tattered coat upon a stick” than a spring in the step; and seen next to a person decades younger, may suddenly convey the impression that he is not an older colleague but a father or even a grandfather.

This is especially the case when older actors play cops, which older actors often do. Why they do so is not entirely clear, since being a police officer is the most unlikely job there is for an elderly person in the United States; police officers in large cities usually retire before their 50th birthday once they have put 20 years into the job, and then go on to another line of work.

And yet, at the tail end of his career, John Wayne made three cop movies; he was 63 when the first was released. Frank Sinatra made two as well, one for television (age 63) and one for the movies (66), before retiring from acting altogether. Michael Douglas was 62 when he played an active Secret Service agent in The Sentinel a few years ago. Harrison Ford was 61 in Hollywood Homicide. What all these movies have in common, aside from being lousy, is that they indicated their once-legendary stars had reached the twilight years of their careers. They were attempting to bury themselves in an old reliable format, carrying guns and playing macho in a transparent effort to trick viewers into believing they were not on the cusp of old age. It didn’t work. It never works.

And now, alas, it has fallen to the 68-year-old Al Pacino and the 65-year-old Robert De Niro to make a pathetic attempt at the same legerdemain in Righteous Kill–which, like all other old-man cop movies, is at best entirely predictable and formulaic and at worst a terribly sad display of vanity on the downward slope.

In Righteous Kill, the boys are New York detectives on the trail of a serial killer who only offs bad guys. They do what all movie cops do. They sit together on stakeouts. They abuse internal-affairs investigators. They get yelled at by their captain (the 70-year-old Brian Dennehy, obviously cast because he makes them look a little younger) who says he’s not going to lose his pension because of them. They get into fights with other detectives over jurisdiction.

It is clear that the script, by Russell Gewirtz, was written for two actors in their early forties because its lead characters crack jokes about The Brady Bunch and Underdog. Only when Pacino starts talking about Greg and Marcia Brady he sounds as though he has no idea what he is referring to–which is understandable, since he was 29 when The Brady Bunch was first shown on television. One might have thought Gewirtz and director Jon Avnet would have saved Pacino from such embarrassment.

Only they wouldn’t have because Pacino clearly wants people to think he can play someone in his mid-40s. As a result, he has allowed himself to turn into a freakish-looking person, with boot-blacked hair that stands up like a kewpie doll’s and a wardrobe more appropriate for Johnny Cash than a veteran of the NYPD. For his part, De Niro spends most of the movie with a puzzled expression on his face, as though he wandered onto the set by accident from his Tribeca restaurant Nobu. This is especially true when he is called on to conduct a torrid, sadomasochistic affair with a forensics officer played by 37-year-old Carla Gugino, who not only is young enough to be his daughter, but actually looks like Robert De Niro’s daughter. In these scenes, De Niro has the decency to look embarrassed. He knows he’s in this for the paycheck; Pacino is in it to stave off the Angel of Death.

There’s a reason that, alone among the actors of their generation, Jack Nicholson is still a major star at 71. Twenty years ago he decided to act his age, and has allowed himself to travel onward with the years. In so doing, he has maintained and even deepened an essential aspect of any great motion picture performer’s aura: his dignity.

And the only time he played a cop, in 2001’s The Pledge, the movie began with his retirement from the job and ended with him going completely insane.

John Podhoretz, the editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.