Brest: Going In Style (1979)

Before he became known as a director of glossy big-budget bromances, Martin Brest wrote and directed Going in Style, a decidedly unglossy comedy about a trio of New York seventy-somethings – played by George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg – who decide, one fine summer’s afternoon, that they might as well rob a Manhattan bank as spend another day at their regular park bench. After all, if they escape, they escape, and if they’re caught, they’re unlikely to get more than three years, with a mountain of social security checks waiting for them once they get out. What ensues plays out as a wonderfully witty denaturing of the intense, focused, cerebral silences so precious to heist and caper films, replaced instead with the profound synergy between these three men who’ve lived together for years and years – we never find out why – and have developed their own wordless rapport, a shared, offbeat oblivion and comfort with their own silence that transforms them into a single, elastic, kinaesthetic presence, as deft and malleable as any heist team, bypassing words in favour of the shared, affective, improvisational memory that Strasberg made the foundation of the Actors Studio. Yet where regular heist films elaborate the team by way of their respective strengths, here the ebb and flow among the trio is arranged more around their encroaching infirmities, with at least one of them quizzically vacant during most encounters, but still somehow present thanks to the slow-burning, spontaneous jouissance that sustains them as a whole. Continually folding and welcoming onlookers into their rapport, even or especially the kinds of identities you might expect to engender a certain kind of kneejerk response in a comedy of this kind - from a Chinese croupier to an African-American cab driver to a gay handbag salesman to a group of Jamaican street artists - they may not have travelled from Queensboro to Manhattan for years, but, in a kind of riposte to the middle-aged vigilante becoming so popular around this time, that only makes them more flexible and open in their attitude to the inner city, to the point where Brest has to choreograph them as much as direct them, as they dodge and skirt their way around a vision of old age that isn’t abject, traumatic or tragic, but simply boring, though not boring enough that the heist can’t alleviate it for a time. At times, they could almost be mistaken for some of Woody Allen's small-time crooks - clad in Groucho Marx glasses for disguise – but in the end they're too well-attuned to the agility of silence, too reared on silent cinema, to slip into Allen's cacaphonous, caperous vision of the Big Apple. It’s a bit of a shame, then, that instead of dealing with the aftermath of the crime in the same picaresque, irreverent register, Brest instead opts for a more sombre tone, such the film seems to visibly age as it proceeds, until we’re faced with a vision of old age that, finally, feels as sentimental and saccharine as that expounded a decade later in Scent of a Woman. Admittedly, there’s an attempt to recapture that picaresque spirit with a late sojourn to Las Vegas, but in the end that just seems to absorb the characters into a more conventional retiree community, just as the movement towards a blacker, darker tone only proceeds by eroding the contagious, charismatic communion that made the opening so special. In the end, the trio are never quite as fun as just when they’re sitting on that park bench, and the brilliance of the film, finally, is to shoot and craft the heist as if they’re still on the bench, suspending us in an offbeat zone between method and madness that feels as if it could or should have been directed by Strasberg as much as Brest. 

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