Reviewing Movies

Watching this movie makes me homesick for long summers at a Lake CottageI have never had the opportunity to spend. Few but the very rich, unless the cottage has been in the family for generations, can afford such a luxury today. My parents spent a week-long honeymoon at a cabin on Molega Lake, Queens County, Nova Scotia seventy years ago. Probably the only such vacation they ever took. Today those not wealthy enough to afford a million dollar cottage property live in trailers in crowded RV Parks.

Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda both at the end of long and distinguished film careers are perfectly cast as Norman and Ethel Thayer Jr. One wonders just what Norman's professorship was in? Henry's daughter Jane plays their screen daughter, Charlie, an old flame still delivers the mail and she shows up with a boyfriend and his son Billy layed by Doug McKeon who at 14 never played a better role. The two marina attendants, one showing off youthful pec development are the only other actors on screen. Of course the pair of loons and the fish are every bit as important to the script. And the lake is an equally important character.

As the aging couple the pair are note perfect, they are mercifully spared a gag reel of flubbed lines. Since the piece is adapted from a screen play the sets are limited to the cottage, the boat on the lake and the dock. The majority of the film involves the developing relationship between Norman and Billy as Norman abandons his morbid preoccupation with death in his growing enthusiasm for showing Billy how to fish. As Ethel says if I'd known how it would bring Norman out of his shell I'd have rented a 13-year-old ages ago.

Life unfolds slowly and gently on Golden Pond as this couple lives out their golden years. Norman grumbles like an old lion just to prove he can still roar. Billy plays the cool teenager from California and Ethel plays the understanding wife who knows her husband better than he does himself. With the Lake never far from the foreground and the loons calling in the background and a piano score playing obbligato this is a movie that calms the soul.