The Last Movie Star

Is 2017's THE LAST MOVIE STAR a fitting valediction for Burt Reynolds? How many elderly "once beens" get a send off like this?  A movie that became more significant following Reynolds' death back in September.  It's not a documentary, but a not so thinly veiled portrait of a once very famous actor who had the world at his feet, "putty in his hands" as the real actor once said in one of his real movies.  But now Vic Edwards is a doddering old man whose best days are long behind him.  The roles are non-existent and he's reduced to gawking at women doing yoga while he lunches with his friend Sonny (played by another sad has been, Chevy Chase, perhaps looking worse than Burt).

One day Vic gets an invitation to a film festival in Nashville, one in his honor, promising fully paid accommodations.  He's reluctant, shy of such attention, but with Sonny's encouragement, decides to go.  What the hell.  The brochure states that past honorees were DeNiro and Eastwood.

It's quickly apparent that the festival is a sham.  His "limo" is a beat up sedan driven by the caustic, bare midriffed Lili (Ariel Winter), sister of the festival organizer, Dog (Clark Duke).  Edwards' films are being played on a projector screen in a bar.  The attendees are a group of twenty-somethings who Edwards sizes up as "losers who watch movies in their parents' basements." He's not wrong, but drunkenly insults his wide eyed fans and acts like a class A jerk.

Edwards decides this debacle will be salvaged by a road trip to Knoxville, his hometown.  Yes, this is another of those films where a geriatric visits his old stomping grounds one final time to say goodbye.  Lili has been recruited to drive him there.  She's pissed, eager to get back to her lout of a boyfriend.  Vic sizes him up, too.  A bad boy, just like he was back in the day.  If he could only go back and right all the wrongs.  Not cheat on those he loved.  Not made all those bad pictures.

Yeah, just like Burt. Writer/director Adam Rifkin gives Vic Edwards a history kinda similar to Reynolds, aside from making him Jewish.  There's a visit to the college football field, the home in which he grew up, the river next to which he proposed to his first wife.  She in fact is still alive, lost to Alzheimer in a local nursing home.  There are lump in throat moments that are manipulative but undeniably effective.  The syrup gets thick in the later scenes.

The cheese is there, too. THE LAST MOVIE STAR (originally called DOG YEARS) features scenes with Vic inserted into moments from SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT and DELIVERANCE, trying to give advice to his younger, devil may care selves.  They are both poignant and slightly embarrassing.  The nadir for me? When Vic gazes at young things (prostitutes?) in the parking lot of his hotel and finds that his bottle of Viagra is empty! This is followed by memories of women lounging on beds, seductively calling to him.  Getting old's a bitch.

But Rifkin's film overall is better than expected, and his direction was surprisingly good at times.  The screenplay is far from perfect, but does agreeable justice to a legend, a man who was a fixture in Palm Beach County, Florida, where I grew up.  I got to meet him a few times.  Larger than life.  R.I.P native son.