Youth Without Youth

Youth Without Youth: an ironic title for a movie so obviously made with an old-man’s perspective, and all about the fear of growing old, the fear of slow, inevitable decay. “Youth is wasted on the young”, says the cliché, but the movie suggests it might be wasted on the old, too.

This movie is an intriguing creature, more poetry than narrative. It’s meant to be philosophical but ends up as more of a dream on philosophy than a true exploration, flitting from one thought, one question to the next without even attempting to find answers. It is, in some ways, a mess, but what a gorgeous, evocative mess it is, from the old-fashioned opening credits to the sad, resigned finale.

Sydney Pollack is no more

Every morning, my radio switches on for about ten minutes, and it’s the news that wakes me. Usually it flies right past me: the sound is enough to wake me, but I’m still too groggy to pay attention to all the horrors happening daily in this world of ours. But every once in a while, a headline will wake me right up.

“Sydney Pollack overleden”

My first reaction was “nah!”. It just didn’t seem possible: to me, Sydney Pollack was, and always had been, about 65, perpetually the slightly dodgy older guy with a glint in his eye and a skeleton or two in his closet. I’ll admit he wasn’t a must-see director for me – I really like Three Days of the Condor, for example, but his later work seemed well-crafted, but not particularly exciting. As an actor, however, he was always a welcome presence. His part in Eyes Wide Shut was both amusing and more than a little sinister. And I’ll remember him not by his very last acting performance, but rather by one from 2007 that slyly nodded to the films he directed in the 70’s:

Sydney Pollack: 1934 – 2008