William Butler Yeats might have described an old person as a “paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick,” but then Yeats didn’t live to see the 72-year-old actress Blythe Danner bloom like a bird of paradise in the first starring role she’s had on screen in her 43-year career. I’ll See You in My Dreams was made over the course of 18 days for $500,000, and its modesty is evident in every frame. Though it is confidently directed by Brett Haley (who cowrote it as well), I’ll See You in My Dreams is so slight and at moments so wispy that it almost seems to disappear as you’re watching it. And yet there is Danner, quietly radiant, holding the movie together and deepening it scene by scene in an all-out star turn that not only heralds a renewed career but also makes you wonder what might have been back in the 1970s, when Danner was in her first full flowering.
She was then an ethereally beautiful young woman—one of the most dazzlingly sexy people in America, whose angelic appearance was belied by a froggy voice that sounded whiskey-soaked. That voice was key to making her one of those rare performers who can mimic intelligence on screen. Danner plays smart. This was so much a part of her persona that I was astonished when, in the late 1970s, I met her briefly at a summer-stock theater in the Berkshires where she came to perform (and where I was making a disastrous showing of my teenage self trying to help build sets in the scene shop) to find her giggly and bubbly—and to hear her refer to herself as “a ditz.” It was an important lesson for me in the difference between what actors are and what actors do.
She never broke big, in part because her acting career took a back seat to her marriage (to the television producer Bruce Paltrow) and her children. Her son Jake is a successful television director; her daughter is Gwyneth Paltrow, who surpassed her mother in her mid-20s by becoming a major star and winning an Oscar before becoming a cautionary example of what can happen when people become too successful too young. (Paltrow’s last really good performance was the one for which she won the Oscar, in Shakespeare in Love; that movie came out 17 years ago, just in case you want to feel like a tattered coat upon a stick.)
In her 50s and 60s, Danner made a second career playing loyal and long-suffering wives and mothers—most notably in the Meet the Parents series, in which she was required to gaze lovingly at Robert De Niro. She was ever the subdued straight man, the speaker of the screenwriter’s thematic wisdom. So it was nothing short of a stroke of casting genius that Haley considered her for the lead role in his longshot Kickstarter project about a self-contained widow whose life and emotions begin to open up against her will when her dog gets sick and her pristine Los Angeles home is invaded by a rat.
Carol’s sole emotional obligation is the care of her dog. Her only diversions are the bridge and golf games she plays with longtime friends who have moved into a nearby retirement community connected to a golf course. She wakes at 6 a.m. She takes her pills, she reads the paper, she eats lunch in her small backyard by the pool, she watches TV, and at 11 p.m. she turns out the light. She drinks a little too much. Her husband died in a plane crash 20 years earlier; she is still living off the life insurance. She has never had a boyfriend. Her loving daughter, who lives in New York, comes to visit and says something inadvertently cutting about how Carol has always been absorbed by her own condition.
Carol forms two unexpected relationships, one with a sad and depressed thirtysomething pool cleaner (played by the wonderful Martin Starr) and the other with a jaunty real-estate developer who has just moved into the retirement community (Sam Elliott). The pool cleaner sees a photo of her singing as a young girl, and she says something about having been in a band in Greenwich Village in the 1960s—something that seems unimaginable, given her controlled and even somewhat severe mien. One night, they end up at a karaoke bar. She gets up and performs for the first time since Greenwich Village.
Danner had a singing part in her first major film, the 1972 adaptation of the Broadway musical 1776, in which she played Mrs. Thomas Jefferson and sang a peppy ditty called “He Plays the Violin.” Ah, the virtues of age! Danner’s pained, gorgeous rendition of “Cry Me a River” here is an absolute knockout, and if she is nominated for an Oscar early next year (which seems a distinct possibility right now), this song will be the reason.
But that’s not really the glory of her work in this film. Her Carol is an almost perfectly realized depiction of a certain type: sardonic, intelligent, brittle, and wonderfully well put together, but in a way that seems to put up a barrier between her and the rest of the world. And the cracks in Carol’s reserve that give the movie its forward momentum are just tiny fissures in her cool surface, because Danner and Haley are honest enough to know a septuagenarian isn’t going to change very much when she changes.
As always with a very little movie, I feel I’m taking a risk in praising it, because one of the reasons I found it such a pleasure is that I was expecting almost nothing from I’ll See You in My Dreams. By definition, that won’t be the case for anyone who has read this review and chooses to watch it on-demand or even go out to see it.
Still, people do seem to like it, because, as I write, it’s the most successful small-budget film in release, and it is playing in more than 100 theaters. That’s not San Andreas, but it’s probably 96 more screens than Brett Haley ever dared hope for. As for Blythe Danner, she can cry herself a river all the way to the bank.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
