The Leisure Seeker

Two peo­ple who can’t live with­out each oth­er, immi­nent­ly face the prospect of sep­a­ra­tion in Pao­lo Virzì’s lilt­ing road com­e­dy, The Leisure Seek­er. Ella (Helen Mir­ren) and John (Don­ald Suther­land) are a head­strong elder­ly cou­ple who dis­obey all pro­fes­sion­al advice to adven­ture in their RV, with which the film shares its name.

They chase their meds with cream-topped milk­shakes and elude their pro­tec­tive chil­dren – a task which proves as much of a chal­lenge as con­fronting their declin­ing health. The trag­ic con­trast between vital­i­ty and degen­er­a­tion cer­tain­ly pulls at the heart­strings. How­ev­er, at times the sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty is used as a crutch to bol­ster some of the more ran­dom plot twists.

As the pair tra­verse the US, a coterie of side-char­ac­ters ensure that each scene fur­ther depicts the couple’s endear­ing idio­syn­crasies as well as the chang­ing face of the coun­try. Writer/​director Virzì even man­ages to throw in a sly cri­tique of Trump’s Amer­i­ca, as the sto­ry is set dur­ing the 2016 elec­tion cam­paign and set to a star-span­gled soundtrack.

John is suf­fer­ing from Alzheimer’s, and the blanks and mem­o­ry laps­es in his head are mir­rored in the banal, inter­change­able brochure designs the cou­ple pick up, as well as the gen­tly-paced trip itself, which seems only to involve car­a­van sites, burg­er shacks and high­ways. Virzì’s rep­e­ti­tion of cer­tain inter­ac­tions with­in these places also allows us to fol­low John’s men­tal dete­ri­o­ra­tion over time. This is a dif­fi­cult role that Suther­land takes on with admirable com­mit­ment, even though his por­tray­al of the more child­ish tics that the ill­ness invokes feel too pro­nounced for the mod­est tenor of the film.

It’s rare to see old­er char­ac­ters in film where age is not their defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic, but in this respect, The Leisure Seek­er chal­lenges the norm. In places, the humour pre­dictably relies on the elder­ly couple’s inter­ac­tions with unfa­mil­iar moder­ni­ty, but Ella’s stub­born sass and John’s fas­tid­i­ous­ness also lead to some laugh out loud moments.

The malig­nant dis­eases that act against Ella and John could eas­i­ly have become the film’s cen­tral attrac­tions. Instead, there is an admirable lev­el if sen­si­tiv­i­ty in the writ­ing, and Virzì main­tains focus on the human­i­ty of these two imper­fect but deeply car­ing people.