Oprah Movie Club for May: Nobody's Fool

1993 dramedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: An old guy with a bad knee's gone nowhere with his life. He left his wife and one-year-old son but only got five blocks away. He keeps working for a guy he can't stand while flirting with his wife when he's not around. He loses at poker and at horse race betting. And he's never gotten a chance to know his grandsons, one who is named Wacker. When his son rolls back into town for Thanksgiving, Sullivan's luck starts to change.

If it wasn't Paul Newman in this role, you probably wouldn't like the character of Donald Sullivan very much, especially in the beginning. Really, you don't even like him played by Paul Newman. He appears to have no redeeming qualities as he's in the last laps of a wasted life. He's got an estranged son he's not seen in three years, he hasn't seen his ex-wife even though they live in the same tiny town, he seems to be taking advantage of a nearly-dead Jessica Tandy whose house he lives in, he walks with an obviously fake limp, he does shoddy work for little pay and then seems to piss it away. Newman's playing a character who seems to wear his sins, like an invisible albatross or two, as he shuffles around the first third of this movie. The only reason you even think about rooting for the guy is because Bruce Willis plays a much bigger asshole, something he seems pretty good at. However, one of the big ideas of this movie is about understanding people in their contexts and allowing people to grow on you. That's the phrase used a couple times in this movie--Newman's character "growing on" people. His character grows on you--the viewer--even if you never fully understand him because the movie gradually feeds us all these little details that make him not only seem like an actual human being but a mostly likable human being. You have to love his words of wisdom to others--"Hang in there" and "Don't get stuck"--two tidbits of dialogue that don't seem all that important but actually do kind of help you understand where he's at and how he got there. I also like how he's learned to adapt to the people around him. He's got an enemy who he seemingly can't beat, but he finds a way to have little victories against the guy and plays poker with him like he's a buddy. He's genuinely admired, for reasons that are never really clear, by Tandy's character, and Tandy's character is the type who we just have to trust because she's got so many wrinkles. He might have a thing for Melanie Griffith's character, the wife of his philandering nemesis, but he spends a lot of their conversations helping her with her marriage problems. He's a good friend to a guy named Rub (or Sancho) and his terrible lawyer. He flirts with a bartender like the coolest old pervert ever. And when his son and grandson enter the scene, he bonds with them the only way the character knows how which is very different than characters in other movies might. Oh, and he knows how to deal with the fuzz, too, turning a little more ornery. Sully's a guy who's learned that varying individuals need varying sorts of interactions. He's good at dealing with people even if he's not had much success with people, and a lot of the fun and humor of this is watching those different interactions. The only thing Sully has difficulty dealing with is the past, his own sins and the sins of his father which he also seems to wear. Luckily for us, those performers Newman interacts with are mostly really good. This has a good ensemble cast. Melanie Griffith is always hard for me to watch because she reminds me of Renee Zellweger, but she's good here. Tandy's fine in her last role and, if I may say so, smokin' hot. I can't believe that a dweeb like Dylan Walsh is going to be Paul Newman's son, but he's fine. I thought Gene Saks was good as the lawyer, and Pruitt Taylor Vince is really good as the wonderfully-named Rub Squeers. Rub Squeers? Oh, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman is in there as a loathsome cop, aggressively delivering all his lines and not really convincing anybody that he's capable of playing a cop at this stage in his career. There are a bunch of little moments that I really liked in this movie. There are a bunch of great one-liners for Newman. I couldn't tell if they were the types of lines that only Paul Newman would have been able to pull off or if they were good lines made better because they were coming from his mouth. There's a surprising little scene with Griffith's ta-tas that I liked quite a bit and might have watched three times. The scene where Rub decides to quit is funny and almost seems like it would fit in a Wes Anderson movie, the aftermath involving some sidewalk driving, a gunshot, and a punch. I was touched by a scene where Rub and Sully are talking about dick length and other things, and there was an odd scene where one of the grandson's gives the lawyer his leg, a big dramatic moment that I know how to be symbolically important in a way I didn't quite get. A final poker game was humorous, especially the single line delivered by Bruce Willis's new secretary ("There is?"). And then there's a shot of Jessica Tandy sitting down with some tea, snow outside the window behind her and then, as the camera pulls back, in the foreground, too, almost like it's snowing in the room. It's such a beautiful scene, the kind of shot that Tandy deserved in her last movie. My biggest gripe with this movie is that the music was so awful, distractingly blase and often just not really fitting at all. I hated it.

One question: Who died? Newman's character is a pallbearer, but for whom? Did I miss something?

Thanks to Josh for picking this movie. Sorry about the tardiness, Oprah Movie Club participants!