Our work in psychotherapy changes dramatically as we age. It is no longer about constructing an identity, staking a claim, separating from family of origin, or the lure of great accomplishments.
.. The problem of the adult is very different. He has put this part of the road behind him, with or without difficulty. He has cut loose from his parents, long since dead perhaps… has possibly come to realize that what originally meant advancement and satisfaction has become a boring mistake, part of the illusion of youth…
Non-stop action: why Hollywood’s ageing heroes won’t give up the gun
There is now apparently no age limit to an action career in Hollywood. The expendables are no longer unemployables, and actors in their 60s and even 70s are high-kicking in can-can routines of choreographed violence. After making a third Indiana Jones sequel in his mid-60s,Harrison Ford was over 70 when he joined the grizzled crew of The Expendables 3 (with Sylvester Stallone weighing in at 68 and Arnold Schwarzenegger at 67), in which the mercenary group does battle with its founder, now resolved to destroy them
.. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler, agonising over whether he might have managed to save one more life, has been made over into a killing machine.
Neeson’s Taken character is a civilian whose unending mission is to rescue and secure his family, which gives him the moral stature to justify any amount of bloodshed.
.. It is easy to feel that the main event of celebrity culture is now the showing-up of the failing flesh, and all the acclaim of youth and freshness that goes before is only a pretext. When identification fails, when the idol fails to retire gracefully, things can turn nasty. Films are so centrally about youth and beauty that ageing on screen is a real taboo
.. The current incarnation of youth in films is not in the equivalent of a John Hughes comedy, but in Richard Linklater’s high-concept movie Boyhood, in which Ellar Coltrane is made to age convincingly from child to man by the drastic decision to film him over 12 years. Linklater’s film seems to have outwitted the enemy, containing and controlling the poignancy of the passage of time, but that is just how it looks now. There is no inoculation against mortality on film, except, strangely, tragic early death. If Coltrane is spared that, then one day soon he will be snapped unshaven and with bags under his eyes, and then he will be all over the media world, the shaming image appearing alongside the dewiest frame of him from Boyhood.
.. a broken nose takes away the potential stigma of prettiness from a male face
.. There is no facial characteristic that communicates, however misleadingly, fearlessness and lack of vanity in women. In film terms, experience seems to add to a man, but subtract from a woman.
.. Anyone who has seen Pedro Aldomóvar’s Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown will have seen the director’s cheeky casting of Francisca Caballero – his mother – as a television newsreader. Women who work in front of a television camera and are unwise enough to pass their 40th birthdays are losing their jobs all the time, but one look at Almodóvar’s film should convince any sensible person that newsreaders in their 40s are not slightly too old, but much too young. What you want, when it is time to hear about the day’s events, is not some glamourpuss but someone who has been around for a bit, someone who has seen a few things in her time, a few wars, floods and Oscar nomination
.. A shrewd film star is both a work of art and its curator. The supreme practitioner in this line must be Marlene Dietrich – when you hired her, you got her lighting man, too, so that she retained full control over the product
.. The first Taken film was made before Neeson’s wife, Natasha Richardson, died suddenly in 2009. If it seems crass to connect a film star’s changing persona with his life experiences, then it is a crassness that was built into the workings of stardom even before modern communications made sure that there was no such thing as a secret sorrow. Film is porous. An event such as Neeson’s bereavement echoes backward in time, filling his segment of Love Actually (widowed father tries to teach his son how to approach the girl he is besotted with) with new associations, though it is anything but classic material in itself.
.. To have gravitas means to inhabit your history, and not to be diminished by your losses. And if that isn’t quite the same thing as real-world maturity, on the big screen it is the best we are going to get.