Movie Review : May-December Love in ‘Last Good Time’

“The Last Good Time” opens with an old widower’s reverie of his wife dancing for him in the firelight. It’s a bittersweet memory he returns to again and again, and it’s a bit too gauzy and precious to be believed. The old man--Joseph Kopple (Armin Mueller-Stahl)--keeps a photo of his wife on the wall of his dank, tidy one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, and her image stands out as a kind of offering. He’s enshrined her memory and closed himself off from any further feeling. He’s only nominally in this world.

“The Last Good Time” is also a bit too gauzy and precious to be believed. It’s a tender fable about tough-tender people, and it makes a show of how unsentimentally sentimental it is. Adapted from the Richard Bausch novel by John McLaughlin and Bob Balaban, who also directed, it’s self-consciously coy. We’re always aware that we’re watching a fable. When Joseph takes in Charlotte (Olivia d’Abo), a battered twentysome-thing neighbor on the run from her boyfriend (Adrian Pasdar), their communion is framed as a life-affirming growth experience: She drops her tough-cookie edginess, and he drops his Old World severity.

It’s a touching relationship, and the performances are sensitive, but the filmmakers are so concerned about not exploiting these two that they end up sanctifying them. Their wary, tentative friendship that leads to a little romance is missing the befuddling fear and exhilaration that we would expect. It’s a prim, bedewed good time.

Balaban is trying to show old age in ways that most movies don’t. He’s trying to dignify old people and not turn them into coots. Another of Joseph’s neighbors, Ida (Maureen Stapleton), and his expiring friend Howard (the great, gruff Lionel Stander in his last feature film role), who is laid up in a nursing home, have a do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night feistiness. And Joseph, who fills out his days reading Plato and Wittgenstein and making diary notes about errands, is oddly admirable in his refusal to whimper.

These people are a welcome change from the cartoon cutups that often pass for oldsters in the movies, and yet the film may move too far in the other direction. It’s a tribute to feistiness that turns the story of their lives into a how-to guide in perseverance.

Like Charlotte, Balaban may admire Joseph’s Old World gravity too much. Joseph is dignified all right, but ultimately he’s not that much more expressive than the strong, silent types who turn up in action films. (His deepest emotions come out when he plays the violin.) And yet you wish him well. When he’s with Ida, you can see what he doesn’t--that he needs someone to care about.

Balaban’s directing debut, the 1988 “Parents,” was a disturbing, highly original black comedy that should have put him on the map big time. But that film was too off-putting for general audiences, and “The Last Good Time,” his third feature, seems like a retreat into comfiness. It’s a well-crafted, very well-acted mood piece that lulls instead of startles.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes brief female frontal nudity and a tasteful suggestion of lovemaking.

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‘The Last Good Time’

Armin Mueller-Stahl: Kopple

Maureen Stapleton: Ida

Lionel Stander: Howard

Olivia d’Abo: Charlotte

A Samuel Goldwyn Co. release of a Dean Silver presentation in association with Klaus Volkenborn. Director Bob Balaban. Producers Dean Silvers, Bob Balaban. Executive producer Klaus Volkenborn. Screenplay by Bob Balaban and John McLaughlin, based on the novel by Richard Bausch. Cinematographer Claudia Raschke. Editor Hughes Winborne. Costumes Kimberly A. Tillman. Music Jonathan Tunick. Production design Wing Lee. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.

* Now playing at the Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinema, Westside Pavilion, (310) 475-0202; Edwards’ Town Center, 3199 Park Center Drive, Costa Mesa; (714) 751-4184.