The Bucket List

“The Bucket List”

USA. 2007. Directed by Rob Reiner. Written by Justin Zackham. Starring: Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, Sean Hayes, Beverly Todd, Rob Morrow, Alfonso Freeman, Rowena King, Annton Berry, Jr., Verda Bridges, Destiny Brownridge, Brian Copeland, Ian Anthony Dale and Jennifer Defrancisco.

Rating: ★★½

They ought to make a special lifetime achievement award for Morgan Freeman as Best Wise Mentor in the movies, as directors tap on him again and again to open and close their films with his narration of witty and pithy maxims. Rob Reiner gets his chance now with The Bucket List, as Freeman’s narration talks about another man whom he says lived more wholly in the last few weeks of his life than the rest of his days put together. When that other man is played by Jack Nicholson, one wonders whether Freeman can tame a wild persona like Nicholson’s.

Putting two great veterans like Nicholson and Freeman together as two terminally ill cancer patients living their lives to the fullest may seem like a winning concept and is the selling point of The Bucket List. The problem with Rob Reiner’s direction and Justin Zackham’s script is that they just trade in on their personas rather than rejuvenating them. We instinctively pay attention to two of the most watchable actors on the screen who do what they do best and are willing to look less than glamorous with shaved heads and surgery scars. But they and everyone involved here seem to be too laid back to add in some creative juice.

After that opening narration, we first see Freeman as auto mechanic Carter Chambers who lights a puffy cigarette as a bad news signal that is about as subtle as writing “lung cancer” in big letters on a chalkboard. When he is hospitalized, he ends up lying next to Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson), who also happens to be the hospital administrator. The cantankerous Edward is not exactly happy to have to abide by his own policy of placing two patients per room for comfort, which he previously strongly advocated in court before coughing up some blood and being diagnosed with cancer himself.

Carter is a history professor in spirit, if not in title due to giving that dream up in order to fulfill his economic obligation to providing for his growing family. The man can answer every single question that comes up on Jeopardy, which Edward watches with amazement. Edward later discovers him writing a bucket list, which Carter explains was an assignment from his old philosophy professor to write the things one would like to do before he or she dies. Carter thinks it is silly at first but upon Edward’s reinforcement, the two escape from the hospital to check off the items on the list. None of the activities listed such as skydiving, racecar driving and traveling on a private jet to such locales as The Pyramids of Giza and The Great Wall of China are beyond their reach because Edward is a super-rich lothario who has a personal assistant, Thomas (Sean Hayes) and is probably only about a two-inch stretch from Jack Nicholson in real life.

Many people were drawn to the trailer that showed the great promise of having Nicholson and Freeman playing off against each other like sandpaper and the disappointment is that the movie itself does not have a whole lot more abrasive humor to offer. There is not much funnier dialogue you will hear, for example, in the skydiving scene when Nicholson says, “This is living!” and Freeman shouts back, “I hate your rotten, stinking guts!” Both actors are comfortable in their respective thespian styles but the screenplay offers very few surprises as the two men check off the list once we realize that the actors will behave exactly according to what they are best known for rather than playing a little more role reversal.

The predictability pervades to the ways that Edward’s and Carter’s lives seek to resolve themselves before they die. Edward, in contrast to Carter who has been married for 45 years to his wife, Virginia (Beverly Todd), had married four times and turns out to have a long-lost daughter that he is not in good terms with. But again, if you have seen the trailer, you can guess the resolution already, as the movie just cuts to a montage without any real dialogue of simmering conflict between the two (which is made even more derivative because Nicholson has played a far richer character of this sort in About Schmidt).

The whole movie progresses like that during their globe-trotting adventures. Each man spills out his guts and then refuses to follow up on an unresolved part of his life but ends up acting on it anyway upon the other’s coaxing. That Carter’s rocky relationship with his wife has some more feeling despite the trappings is more of a tribute to Todd, who really grows to be the most compelling probably because her lacking the star power of her fellow actors allows her to make much more of what could have been a shrill wife character who wants her man to come home and spend his last few months with his family.

I hate to knock on a movie that tries to earnestly deal with issues of life and death and I have nothing against a more optimistic, feel-good treatment of the material. But the screenplay by Justin Zackham just seems to have been cobbled together after jotting down notes from repeated viewings of Nicholson’s and Freeman’s greatest hits and does not make their characters’ lives unpredictable enough to feel more real and less soapy. That certainly does not help director Rob Reiner who has failed to capture in recent years the real comical spin and zing he brought to his past films like This is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, and The American President, though this one is certainly better than his last few unbearably cloying clunkers like The Story of Us, Alex and Emma and Rumor Has It.

It’s a missed opportunity, as what could have been a deep reflection and meditation on life is simply condensed to watching something of an actors’ retrospective, which you might have guessed from the fact that I mentioned their names so many times throughout. Of course, I am not without high regards for the two actors even if I felt I was watching them more than caring about their characters’ ultimate fates and no one dispenses fortune cookie advice like “Find the joy in your life” more persuasively and charismatically than Freeman. When he later gets his lifetime achievement Oscar, he could just a pick a clip of one of his past movie narrations instead of writing his own acceptance speech.