By Curt Schleier
By now you’ve probably seen the trailers of THE BUCKET LIST on TV: rich white guy with terminal cancer gets put into a hospital room with a smart working class black guy with terminal cancer. The two bond and go on a series of final adventures together.
It sounds a little hokey, but with (I think) a single glaring exception, director Rob Reiner pulls off this combo tear-jerker comedy. Of course, he couldn’t have done it without Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.
No matter what role Nicholson plays, he leaps off the screen at you and grabs you by the throat. That works perfectly with Freeman’s dignified and understated elegance, which draws you right back in.
Nicholson is Edward Cole, who owns a chain of hospitals around the country. He’s a no-nonsense businessman who is used to getting his way. The only reason he isn’t in a private suite is that when he bids to takeover an existing facility, one of his selling points is that every patient bunks two to a room.
Freeman is Carter Chambers, an auto mechanic who is so well read he knows the question to every Jeopardy answer. They are an unlikely match and circle each other warily, at first, which, of course is the point. Both are in experimental programs and both get bad news about their future prospects.
Carter, who’d attended college briefly, had a freshman philosophy professor who assigned his students the task of drawing up a bucket list – that is a list of things they want to accomplish before they kick the bucket. Cole catches Carter creating a new list and jumps in with both feet.
“We got a real opportunity here,” Cole tells the reluctant Carter. “We’re asymptomatic. We can hope for some miracle from some bullshit science experiment or we can put on the moves.”
Carter’s wife Virginia (Beverly Todd) wants him to stay with her. She’s a nurse and can care for him. There are other experimental programs she wants him to try, and if all else fails she wants her husband to spend his last days with her family, not with some stranger he just met. Ultimately, though, he decides to go along with the scheme and soon finds himself aboard Cole’s private plane jetting around the world.
They sky dive together, go on an African safari, visit the Pyramids, and get a snow storm away from seeing the Himalayas in all their glory. No surprise that the two of them grow increasingly closer. “I wish I’d met you before we were dead,” Cole says.
Of course they open up to each other. Carter has a great family and wonderful wife. But their relationship has strained since their children left the house. He wonders where the passion went.
Cole on the other hand has gone through wives like a hot knife through butter. He has a daughter he hasn’t seen in years. Because there was something hinky about his prospective son-in-law, Cole didn’t approve of the match and was not invited to the wedding. He turned out to be right, because the man physically abused his wife. When Cole heard about it, he had the matter taken care of. The son-in-law was not killed, but was made to disappear – and that ticked the daughter off even more.
This is not a great movie. In great movies you don’t essentially know the end from watching the trailer. But it is very good and enjoyable. The entire cast does a wonderful job. In addition to Nicholson and Freeman, Sean Hayes, as Thomas, Cole’s long-suffering assistant, adds wit and charm. It is not a great movie, but it is a very pleasant evening. Production designer Bill Brzeski also did a fine job. Not how cold and sterile Cole’s home looks compared to the warmth of Carter’s. But…
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen the movie and do not want to learn a key element of the plot please do not read on. Something happens at the very opening minutes of the film that is intended to throw you off. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but suffice it to say that when you find out the truth it will sour the film for you. I don’t know why directors feel the need to include these silly plot devices to throw you off. Do they not have enough faith in the strength of their project or their ability to make it entertaining? In this case Reiner might have done it recognizing the plot was predictable. I enjoyed the film. I marveled at how Reiner & Co. were able to make this potentially maudlin film both meaningful and comfortable. Until the end, when I felt betrayed.