‘The Old Man & the Gun’ Features Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek at Their Most Charming

It’s not ten minutes into director David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun before the film has thoroughly charmed the pants off of its audience. I’m assuming. Perhaps you’re far more resistant to charm than I am (or you have far sturdier suspenders), but by the time Robert Redford’s career bank robber starts flirting with Sissy Spacek in a quiet little diner by puffing himself up as a stylish, even courteous bank robber, you’d have to be made of the least interesting stone on earth not to feel yourself smile. The gag, of course, is that he really is a stylish and courteous bank robber, only when he says so, she doesn’t believe him.

Mostly, at least. As the movie goes along, your perspective changes; sometimes you think she does know, sometimes you think she’s always known, sometimes you think she is indeed in the dark. It’s ultimately not important what Spacek’s character knows and when she knows it. Just as the mechanics of Redford’s heists aren’t important to the plot. This is a movie that rides on the thrill of watching a good and beguiling man continually get away with a series of crimes that even his victims can’t begrudge him for. His fellow bank robbers — the “Over the Hill Gang,” played by Tom Waits and Danny Glover — could be your grandfather’s cards group, slightly eccentric but mostly friendly and a little tired. Nobody gets hurt in these heists, and half of the bank managers emerge from them talking about the gentlemanly behavior of the old man with the gun. …Or at least they assume he has a gun. …Well, he said so!

David Lowery has directed five movies since his 2009 debut, the runaway-children indie St. Nick. The fact that it’s incredibly challenging to find a throughline connecting all five of them — the married-fugitives elegy Ain’t Them Bodies Saints which so impressed Sundance audiences in 2013; the sweet, tactile, and and unexpectedly heartfelt Disney adaptation Pete’s Dragon; the esoteric, metaphysical love story A Ghost Story; and now The Old Man & the Gun — is part of what makes Lowery one of his generation’s brightest lights. There’s no telling which direction he’ll take or which stylistic flourishes he’ll employ. One interesting constant has been Redford, who founded the very Sundance Film Festival that launched both Ain’t Them Bodies and A Ghost Story, and who’s starred in both Pete’s Dragon and The Old Man & the Gun. Their is a partnership that spans the breadth of a few generations of American indie filmmaking, and it suggests perhaps even a passing of the torch into good hands. The Old Man & the Gun represents so many new facets to Lowery’s arsenal: it’s light, it’s nimble, it’s unabashedly star-focused (compare this with A Ghost Story, which kept Casey Affleck under a sheet the whole time). You wouldn’t call this movie “challenging” the way Lowery’s other movies are. Which doesn’t make it a lesser work. There is zero guilt in the myriad pleasures found in this movie (well, aside from the presence of Casey Affleck, whose #MeToo past continues to vex).

It’s also worth nothing that it took until 2018 to get Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek into the same movie together. As fun as it is to follow Redford’s gentlemanly robberies, with Daniel Hart’s buoyant score pressing us all along, it’s the Redford/Spacek check-ins that make the movie truly sing. If this movie doesn’t win the AARP Movies for Grownups Award for Best Grownup Relationship, we should riot. These are two characters who spark to each other right away and then spend the rest of the movie recognizing the fact that this feeling doesn’t come along all that often, so they shouldn’t let this one go lightly. In the thick of awards season, Lowery’s film isn’t speaking to some of the Big Issues that the big Oscar contenders are, but, as one character puts it when discussing Redford’s character, “I’m not talking about making a living, I’m just talking about living.” That’s the vibe here. That’s why you’ll like it.