MOVIE REVIEW : For Lemmon, a Multifaceted Feat in ‘Dad’

“Dad” (citywide) wants desperately to deal frankly with old age. Not just the wise old Polident-commercial variety, with golden oldsters arm in arm, but the part that every one of us fears: intrusive medical procedures, pitiless physicians, loss of our abilities and our very functions, the encroachment of real or imagined terrors.

The fact that all these terrors are mirrored in Jack Lemmon’s performance as 75-year-old retiree Jake Tremont, and in the interaction between him and Ted Danson, who plays his son, is all to the credit of the film’s director/adaptor, Gary David Goldberg, of television’s “Family Ties.”

Lemmon’s work is extraordinary; notably unsentimental for an actor who has, at times, become awash with sentiment and something of a marvel physically. It’s nice too that Goldberg has been true to the essence of the character of Jake’s wife, Bette (Olympia Dukakis), who is, through and through, a really nasty piece of work. In the original novel, her son dispassionately describes his mother’s 50-year-long run as a wife as “a simple matter of miscasting.”

But also at Goldberg’s door is the fact that the film has no clear through-line; that it branches off onto limbs that should have been pruned back, and that eventually it succumbs to a prettified sentimentality that its performers have gone to some lengths to avoid.

Goldberg has picked a diabolically difficult book to adapt: William Wharton’s 1981 novel of the same name, with more than a hint of personal experience about it. The book too is cluttered and diffuse, but it still has nice, uncompromisingly rough edges to it that this film adaptation has planed away. It was an honest, painful record; it has been nudged into family-style uplift.

Everything is now within our experience, or within the experience of a devoted television viewer. Rather than an expatriate American painter with children and a French wife, Danson’s John Tremont is now a Wall Street go-getter, attached umbilically to his computer and detached from his family. It includes his ex-wife and his teen-age son, Billy (Ethan Hawke, of “Dead Poet’s Society”). Useless to wonder, of course, why he couldn’t have been a painter, or why we had to suffer again through the cliche of the overachieving American executive who cannot feel but will learn to.

It’s Dukakis’ heart attack that brings Danson to California, but it’s his father’s deteriorating condition that shocks him into staying a while. After more than 40 years with a domineering, overprotective wife, any will that the elderly man had has been eroded. He cannot even pick out his pajamas or butter his toast.

While his mother recovers in the hospital, as a pure act of conscience, Danson taps through to the man he once knew--bringing him back to a degree that Danson’s sister (the splendid Kathy Baker) and brother-in-law (Kevin Spacey) find almost miraculous. The line here between sitcom timing and truth is a fine one, and for the most part, truth wins out. These scenes may be kitsch, but it’s kitsch that works. It’s sweet to see the habits and bywords that once linked these men surfacing again.

Then medical mishandling by a stubborn, heedless doctor reduces Lemmon to childlike senility, wiping out the loving advancements his son has made and taking the story into new areas, a violent roller coaster ride full of them.

Disaster. Shamanlike doctors. Recovery. Violent swings of behavior. Fathers and sons. Doctors and sons. Sons and fathers. Wives and husbands. Mothers and sons. Mothers and neighbors. Much of a muchness.

No movie can retain its intent with this much cluttering up the plumb line of its story. “Dad” certainly can’t. And that’s without even doing much with the subplot about Lemmon’s “successful schizophrenia,” his 40-year retreat from his wife’s nagging to a powerful and completely imaginary other life as a farmer in rural New Jersey.

It’s a pity, because there are individual moments here of surpassing tenderness and compassion. It’s unlikely that anyone who sees it will forget Lemmon’s physical regression, in which he literally seems to shrink to an 80-pound wraith, or the moment in which Danson climbs onto his father’s bed for the sort of farewell that most sons (or daughters) wish they could make.

These truths don’t seem to satisfy the film makers, though. (This is a movie made under the Amblin banner, after all.) With all that Olympia Dukakis has done to keep this unpleasant wife true to herself, she is undercut by a smarmy ending, which insists that she would begin to act utterly contrary to the habits of 70 years. The film is determined to wear a smile button at its close, and damn the consequences to the material. So damned it remains.

Impossible to discuss “Dad” without mentioning the truly magical job of Lemmon’s makeup, designed by Dick Smith. It’s matched, of course, by the actor’s physical contributions, but even in a decade of extraordinary realistic makeup (Edward James Olmos in “Stand and Deliver,” Shirley MacLaine through the decades in “Terms of Endearment” among them), this stands out. Dukakis’ makeup designer has no individual credit, but should; the overall credited make-up artist is Ken Diaz. Bravo, gentlemen.

“DAD”

An Amblin Entertainment presentation of a Gary David Goldberg film. Executive producers Steven Spielberg, Frank Marshall, Kathleen Kennedy. Producers Joseph Stern, Goldberg. Co-producers Sam Weisman, Ric Kidney. Director, writer Goldberg, based on the novel by William Wharton. Camera Jan Kiesser. Production design Jack DeGovia. Editor Eric Sears. Music James Horner. Costumes Molly Maginnis. Art director John R. Jensen. Lemmon’s make-up designer Dick Smith. With Jack Lemmon, Ted Danson, Olympia Dukakis, Kathy Baker, Kevin Spacey, Ethan Hawke, J. T. Walsh, Zakes Mokae, Peter Michael Goetz.

Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG.