THE ODD COUPLING : Grumpy Geezers vs. Cantankerous Coots

Movies whose stories focus on senior citizens are rare--so it seems doubly shocking that Warner Bros. decided to release two of them within a week of each other during the highly competitive Christmas season.

And not just any two films about the Social Security set: Both “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway” (which opened in limited release on Dec. 17, to go wider in January) and “Grumpy Old Men” (opened wide on Christmas) center on a pair of older men working out issues of friendship, aging and loneliness. Both feature Oscar winners and nominees in their casts: Robert Duvall and Richard Harris in “Wrestling”; Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in “Grumpy.” Both “Grumpy,” which is on 1,200 screens, and “Wrestling,” which is on only three, averaged more than $3,000 per screen.

What gives? Warner Bros.’ marketing executives declined to be interviewed for this story. But the films’ directors have a few ideas--and neither seems upset about the timing.

“They saw them as two completely different movies,” says Randa Haines, who directed “Wrestling.” “They really have nothing in common in terms of story.”

Donald Petrie, director of “Grumpy Old Men,” says: “Frankly, I was nervous. But Warner Bros. convinced me that they would get very different releases. They’re saying, ‘Here’s a Christmas movie with a wide release and here’s another, more dramatic, more substantial film with a more limited release that will break bigger in January or February at Oscar time.’ ”

Haines consciously made a film that treated the elderly in a manner that broke with recent film conventions: “So often, you see older people used as an easy joke, as though they’ve crossed a boundary and become a different kind of human being. That’s not true. We don’t talk down to or make fun of these people.”

The surprise, Petrie says, is not that both films are coming out at the same time but that both films got made at all. “I was afraid that, because they were making hers, they would scrap ‘Grumpy Old Men,’ ” Petrie admits. “I don’t know, if I was a studio head, if I’d take the risk. (But) from a demographic and marketing point of view, statistically, the over-50 set doesn’t go to the movies. Films targeted at an older audience are a harder sell.”

Observes Haines: “Maybe it’s a good sign that they don’t think they can only make one old-person movie, the way they say, ‘We can only have one woman’s movie.’ There’s always an appetite for a movie like this, that people tell each other about.”

“I think what the studio hopes,” Petrie says, “is that people will say, ‘Hey, I liked ‘Wrestling Ernest Hemingway’; let’s go see ‘Grumpy Old Men.’ They hope the films will complement each other--rather than cancel each other out.”