The old man is plagued by nightmares and haunted by disturbing flashbacks of a woman in distress. He wakes up at all hours of the night. His only companions in his isolated Victorian country house are his two trusty black Rottweilers, Dave and Carol. To break his spells of loneliness, he speaks every so often with his daughter, Emily, on the phone. We don’t know much about her, other than that she is very concerned that her father is no longer the man he used to be. “When I was a little girl,” she says to him during one of these phone conversations, “you were indestructible. There was no one and nothing that you would ever let hurt you. There was no one and nothing that you would ever let hurt me. When I was a little girl, you were a king, and everything I knew was your kingdom. I guess what I’m asking is: Where did that guy go?”
We don’t know much about this old man either, but we do know this: he is Jeff Bridges, one of our genuine living screen legends of the generation in which too many are suddenly being felled by time’s merciless march (William Hurt, Ray Liotta, and now James Caan, in just recent news). But, having survived a recent bout with lymphoma, the gray-haired, thickly bearded 72-year-old Bridges thankfully still abides, giving us a cool, cunning performance in the heat of summer as Dan Chase in FX on Hulu’s compelling new series The Old Man (an adaptation of the 2017 novel of the same name by Thomas Perry).
Chase challenges his daughter’s contention that there was nothing that ever made him afraid, but he does admit that something hasn’t been right with him lately. Suspecting possible cognitive impairments that could be indicators of impending dementia, he goes to a doctor to get himself checked out, but the physician tells him that all his tests came back fine — they found nothing out of the ordinary. This doesn’t assuage his daughter. “Tell me I shouldn’t be worried,” she tells her father, “because I am.” She reminds him that his now-deceased wife, her mother, went through an agonizing cognitive decline of her own.
We now understand that the nightmares and dark flashbacks that continue to haunt Chase are of his wife, whom he took care of in spite of her having urged him to put her away somewhere. We’re watching the struggle of a widower who lives alone after caring for a spouse in decline.
If The Old Man were only about these aspects of this old man’s life, it might have been enough, especially with Bridges in the lead role — there are still remarkably few great works of film or television that have explored this chapter of our lives with the kind of care and attention typically given to coming-of-age tales and midlife crisis stories, last year’s Oscar-winning The Father and 2012’s best foreign film Oscar winner, Amour, being notable exceptions — but Bridges’s old man takes a turn from the ordinary to the extraordinary when, during yet another lonely night, the quiet in Chase’s seemingly conventional life is broken when an intruder breaks into his home.
His trusty dogs provide the first lines of growling, sharp-toothed defense before Bridges finishes off the burglar with his gun. After reporting the incident to the police, he hastily packs his bags and leaves the house. “They found me,” he tells his daughter on the phone while driving away. They? Who? What had he done, and who are these people who are after him? Chase, as we now begin to learn, is no ordinary old man.
In his former life, he was, as Emily had hinted to us, a man trained in the arts of lethal combat who was involved in a number of dangerous pursuits. He had tried to leave that life behind when he went missing in action from the CIA roughly three decades ago, but the past catches up. As season one of The Old Man reveals for us piece by jigsaw puzzle piece, Chase has made his life and his daughter’s extremely precarious in the present. The conveniently named Chase is forced to go on the run and fight for his life.
The Old Man is cut from a similar cloth as the 2005 David Cronenberg film A History of Violence, in which Viggo Mortensen plays a seemingly ordinary man living a quiet life in a peaceful small town in Indiana whose troubled history one day becomes his distressed present, forcing him to go on the run from pursuers who have found him while also forcing him to once again use some long-remembered violent techniques. A History of Violence also features the aforementioned Hurt’s final Oscar-nominated performance, comparable to the manner in which The Old Man features a fine performance by another actor of a similar vintage, John Lithgow, who portrays Harold Harper, a hard-charging FBI official.
The show does have some dense stretches, and it sometimes tells rather than shows what it is trying to say. But, in spite of dialogue-heavy stretches, it makes for riveting viewing. The Old Man is a strong high-octane vehicle for the redoubtable Bridges, reminding us that the dude’s still got it.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
