Our Souls at Night

Director: Ritesh Batra
Year Released: 2017
Rating: 2.0

Sleep-deprived widow Addie (Jane Fonda), in a bold move, asks neighbor (and widower) Louis (Robert Redford) to share a bed with her (but no sex!), which gets the fuddy-duddies in town to start gossiping about them - later, they become surrogate parents for Addie's grandson Jamie (Iain Armitage) when Jamie's dad (Matthias Schoenaerts) has marital problems of his own. It leans almost entirely on nostalgia for effect, with Redford and Fonda having worked together in the past - they have immediate chemistry - since it's too cozy for any sort of emotional rattling: it's clear neither principal actor, both in or near their 80's, is going to be deeply shaken by whispering and disapproving looks (they've been through it all before). The 'actual' drama, as it were, is taking place in the lives of their immediate offspring (Schoenaerts and Judy Greer's characters), but they're relegated to the background. A more glib title might have been: Our Faces After Surgery.