I’ve spent the past three weeks brooding on death. I had an ailment that could have been any one of four things, and of course I feared the worst. I was afraid to tell anyone about my symptoms because my auditors would make me go to the doctor and I would then hear and know and have to face the dire truth.

Like Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters, my hypochondria seemed finally to be facing the reality of age and ill health. Instead of working at night, I was exhausted, as much mentally as physically. I would take to my couch, watch old, beloved movies such as Anatomy of a Murder and The Apartment, gaze about my room in despair and brood on the disposition of my possessions, and endured a cavalcade of memories, many long distant, of events, slights given and received, opportunities won or lost, now all as dust. Whilst walking around the city, I slipped into funks seeing mothers with their young children, wondering to myself Why?, Why bother with all the hard work and attention of rearing the young when they are simply going to go their own way, exist in a degraded society, and forget about you?

When I was finally exhausted both physically and mentally of this onslaught, I got up the courage to visit the doctor. This is itself a process that comprises a series of concentric rings, each one smaller yet at the same time made of multiple baby steps that elongate time. First you have to make the decision, which is a long wrestle. Then you have to really, really, really go to the clinic. Once there, you must sign in, a laborious and unnerving process, followed by an inhuman wait. Each time the door opens, you both want and don’t want the next name summoned to be your own.

But even when the summons finally comes, the concentric rings grow smaller. There’s the weighing in, the nurse’s queries, the BP and other measurements. Then there is the doctor himself, to whom one must reiterate for the second or third time that night (and the umpteenth time that week) your various symptoms. There is another wait, another test, another wait, and finally the doctor arrives with the verdict. Will you live or will you die? In this case, at this time, it was life, at least provisional life for the nonce.

That’s the horrific prelude to terminal judgments. The Bucket List is about the fun part.

The fun part of death is having enough money and an equaniminous mental balance to indulge some final fantasies, the bucket list being those things you want to do before you die. Lists are big in the media these days, what with Earl and his list, and the year-end round ups. But here these sorting, organizing aids are an excuse for a series of dull, poorly shot globe-trotting vignettes that put one in mind director Rob Reiner’s earlier disaster, North.

The script is credited to Justin Zackham, and has what feels like 40 minutes of back-story as it laboriously contrives to put in the same hospital room Edward Cole and Carter Chambers. Chambers (Morgan Freeman) is an auto-repairman; Cole owns the very hospital in which he is confined. Both have cancer with poor prognoses. Cole’s assistant, Thomas (Sean Hayes) insists that Cole not be perceived to go against the punitive rules of his own institution by having a private chamber. Wariness; a grudging friendship; Chambers’s wife doesn’t understand what he is going through; the bright idea, take that list and do all the things on it, such as sit on top of Mount Everest (where Freeman has already visited, by the way, in Bruce Almighty); wacky sequences sky diving and auto racing; a medical set back or two; secrets revealed (Cole has an estranged daughter), a contrived falling out just like in a romantic comedy starring Drew Barrymore; the tear-evoking reunion. We have all been there before, so many, many times before, but never so mechanically, nor with special effects, such as a view of the pyramids the pair are supposedly visiting, that are beyond laughable, beyond contempt for the audience. While dining in an exclusive Italian eatery, one can see the ocean through the windows in the background, where the boats don’t even bother to bob on the water. Are they sick, too? This is the kind of movie in which “France” is introduced by the use of an Edith Piaf song.

This being a cynical escapist entertainment made by rich Hollywood “intellectuals,” Cole has to hint that he is an atheist, and then be refuted by Chamber’s dignified and wise counsel, for no brow is so broad in the middle it can tolerate diversity in its movies. There are a couple of well-delivered lines. Cole, vomiting from chemo, says to himself in the mirror, “Somewhere some lucky guy is having a heart attack.” In addition, Chambers quips, “I’ve taken a bath deeper than you,” and there is a Freeman in-joke about Sesame Street. However, most of the jokes are borrowed from the easy laugh catalog, such as this on the pyramids: “How do we get down from this tomb?” “Well, how did you get up here?”

These witticisms are rendered further unappetizing by Nicholson’s gruff voice, which I find unlistenable these days. Couple with his patented screen-time hogging mannerisms, the film is insufferable. Nicholson is just one of several actors whose voices seemed to be shredded by misuse or perhaps poor theatrical training, including Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and Clint Eastwood. English actors, regardless of how aged they grow, don’t seem to suffer this late-life deterioration.

But the worst aspect of the film is the treatment of Sean Hayes’s character. I don’t get why it is funny that he should be abused and put down so much by Cole, especially in light of the recent scandals about abuse that personal assistants receive at the hands of celebrities. But maybe that is another sign that Hollywood insiders continue to be detached from ordinary salt-of-the-earth morality.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.