Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel contemplate their navels in Youth.
By Josh Lasser
Everyone wonders about the choices that they are making, will make, or have made in life. Contemplating what your decisions have wrought (or will bring) is natural and as one gets older there are only more decisions to look back on and, potentially, lament.
Enter Paolo Sorrentino’s new movie, Youth. The film stars Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as two elderly friends vacationing in Switzerland and looking back at their lives. Caine is Fred Ballinger, a retired composer. Keitel is Mick Boyle, a Hollywood writer and director who eschews retirement and is currently working on the screenplay for what he is sure will be his ultimate triumph.
The men, friends since youth, are now also tied together by their children, Lena Ballinger (Rachel Weisz) and Julian Boyle (Ed Stoppard), who are married and about to head off on a vacation.
We want to hear it.
A very talky movie, Youth features conversations between the older men as they remember past loves, almost loves, and what their lives have brought them. Along the way they share these ruminations with Lena and Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano), a famous actor staying at their hotel.
The conversations are, actually, quite wonderful. They ask the audience to think about the way we talk to one another, the way we act to our children and families, and the way we proceed about our career choices. They are also incredibly, horrifically, one-sided.
The biggest fault Youth has, and it is a large problem, is its desire to only show the world from the male perspective. Women are objects of lust, are ways to promote a career, are loving mothers, and are repeatedly nude throughout the film. There is some gazing at the male form, but it is far less regular and the film lingers on such images for a far shorter time. Fred and Mick, however, are lecherous old men.
For her part, Lena learns that her husband wants to leave her. Rather than the film allowing us insight into Lena’s life and who she is, we still only get Lena’s story as it relates to other men. We watch as she discusses it with her father, as Mick discusses it with her, and as she finds someone new to love.
Jane Fonda and Harvey Keitel in Youth.
In what ought to be a powerful scene with Lena telling her father how she feels and what she thinks, there is no engagement on Fred’s part. The two are not looking at each other and he doesn’t offer a deep and thoughtful response. Lena may as well be alone for it. It seems within the world of Youth that women are only complete when they have a man or are being looked at by a man.
This issue isn’t confined only to Lena either. At one point, Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea) comes to the hotel. While Mick and Fred lust after her, she is the object of derision when she opens her mouth to speak and rather than being vapid proves well read and intelligent. Jimmy is rude to her upon their first meeting and, once the meeting ends, he and Fred laugh over her being smart and defying their expectations, rather than acknowledge how horribly Jimmy acts to her.
On and on Youth goes, exploring truths among the men, revealing secrets, and coming to a greater understanding of this world and our place in it. What the men say about things in the larger scheme may often be wise and could prove to be accurate, but it is always undercut by the way the film treats the women in these men’s lives.
Youth is a beautiful film to look at. The Swiss Alps backdrop is magnificent. Fred and Mick are also both interesting men, with Keitel and Caine offering solid performances. Dano, by far, is the most charismatic on screen and offers a great, younger perspective on what Mick and Fred discuss. He broadens their horizons and accepts (or challenges) their wisdom. Somehow though, the film decides that the women are wholly irrelevant. The characters are people talking about their lives and the great and terrible moments in them. Women are no small part of these discussions and the men’s lives, however, none of the women present in the movie are afforded the opportunity to enter these discussions. They are entirely acted upon rather than given any agency. It is a monumental miscalculation in a film that would otherwise be described as witty and smart and thoughtful.
