Simply A Masterpiece

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

As often as I can, I try to give a second, or a third watch to one of those movies, somehow powerfully charming for me. I go back to them, again and again, to confirm my feelings about the story that enchanted me when I saw it for the first time.The films don't change, they are always the same, forever and ever. It's just you, me, those who are not the same anymore. So, if I fall in love again with the film I first watched as a teenager, when I took my mother with me to the local movie theatre and now, again, as I did by that time, cried and laughed at this story about life and getting old, oh well, that's simply because the film is that good.

On Golden Pond was a showcase of great acting, great characters of age. A bit fluffy at times, but pleasant.Katherine Hepburn in particular was wonderful. Chelsea was a bit annoying and maybe in the right, but not likable. The kid, while not annoying only really retracted from the good in the film, as all the best moments were of Ethel and Norman. The plot is supposed to be about a daughter's relationship with her father, but Jane comes for her father's birthday and they just argue, she leaves for a while leaving the kid there, the kid forms a bond with him, Jane comes back and now they will just get on because she wants them too. Nothing was resolved, the ending was silly. If the entire film had of been just Ethel and Norman, I think I would of loved it.

A few things struck me while I was watching "On Golden Pond". The obvious thing was the co-starring of two generations of Fondas. I understand that Henry Fonda and Jane Fonda hadn't been on the best terms due to her political activism in the '60s, and so this movie was a sort of reconciliation for both of them.As for the plot, the movie comes across as a "nice movie" that you can take the kids to see. Katharine Hepburn's "knight in shining armor" quote pretty much sums up the movie's feeling. I'm not saying that it's a bad movie, just a little too fluffy. It's a surprise seeing Jane Fonda and Dabney Coleman play wife and husband, since they had just played enemies in "9 to 5".Basically, it's a watchable movie, but not any sort of masterpiece. Probably worth seeing once. So strange to think that Henry Fonda won an Academy Award for the role and died a few months later.

"On Golden Pond" works through the same themes that occupied many big-time play adaptations between the 1950s and the 1980s. Like "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958) and "The Lion in Winter" (1968) it is about inter- generational family dysfunction, and it seems to want to embarrass or shock the audience through a frankness of discourse. It is the kind of script that purports to peel away the supposedly-artificial niceties of middle-class life to get to the meat of matters, which in the minds of these kinds of playwrights always seems to mean sex and death. Tennessee Williams and James Goldman made that format dance, and watching the great Hollywood versions of their works is thrilling because of the way they constantly try to set new records for speed and intensity and brutal honesty. "On Golden Pond" imitates these classics but with a lower degree of commitment. It's slower and gentler, and it never seems to let a barb stand unaccompanied by a sappy line or a nostalgic musical cue. It's a movie that's easy to like, because it's a suger-coated pill. As Williams and Goldman knew, there's nothing challenging about a sugar-coated pill. To them, the purpose of writing characters who speak in a forthright way about difficult issues was to make us face our fears and anxieties, and their genius was to do this while also being entertaining. "On Golden Pond" wants to do these things, but it wants to go down easy. That impulse is not altogether a bad one; compare it with another play adaptation, 1966's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," which aims to scream the loudest and cut the deepest only to end up as thoroughly unlikable as its characters. Toward the beginning, "On Golden Pond" echoes "Virginia Woolf" as Henry Fonda's irascible "old poop" tries to discomfit a polite younger man with blunt sexual talk. By the middle of the movie, though, this riff on Edward Albee's hard-edged approach gives way to a much sweeter narrative about an unlikely friendship between Fonda's 80-year-old and a 13-year-old boy. It's nice, but it's predictable and safe and familiar and forgettable whereas its predecessors succeeded by being none of those things. Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda are believable, though, and Jane Fonda threatens to upstage both of them as their adult daughter whose eyes betray an inner mixture of depression and resentment and a certain flightiness born of self-doubt. If nothing else, what "On Golden Pond" shares in full measure with its more ambitious and significant forerunners is magnificent acting by a top-shelf cast.