Never Grow Old movie review & film summary (2019)

Other than that, the wizened, vaguely comical craftsman wasn’t much of a character. In “Never Grow Old” Emile Hirsch plays a much younger undertaker and carpenter, settled with his family in a town called Garlow, located, a title card tells us, on the California Trail. That trail extended from Western Missouri to Northern California, and while Northern California weather is decidedly different from that of the state’s southern regions, I reckon this environment is pretty far from the Sunshine State. The environs of this revisionist Western written and directed by the Irish filmmaker Ivan Kavanagh are relentlessly glum. Gray skies and mud abound.

Hirsch’s character, Patrick Tate, is/was a cog in Garlow’s slow-turning wheels, we learn after a prologue promising cathartic violence. After showing him presiding over a burial, the film presents the town’s fire-and-brimstone preacher discoursing, tiresomely, on how much better the town is now that liquor is banned. He prattles on about what it means to be in America and all that nonsense that contemporary writers of revisionist Westerns like to imagine unenlightened 19th century characters used to dribble back before everybody knew better. Except everybody doesn’t know better, is the point. And what a great point it is, one that no other movie has ever made.

The peace of the town is interrupted by the arrival of outlaw Dutch Albert, played by John Cusack, who’s dressed entirely in slimming black and often hides much of his face behind the large brim of his cowboy hat. Dutch is unimpressed with the town’s piety and reopens the saloon, soon turning it into a brothel. He also starts killing people, which ups business for Patrick. In the grand tradition of no actual criminal ever, Dutch takes an interest in the relatively virtuous Patrick. Noting that he is an Irish immigrant, he quizzes the undertaker on how he’s getting along in these United States. Does it bother him that the Irish are seen by other portions of the populace as “savages?” Finally, he asks, “You think a decent, honest man like you can be friends with a guy like me?”

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