How interested are you in Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton? I mean,
really? Both are tremendous, even legendary actors that have commanded
audiences for years, and it could be said they've actually grown more charming
with age. But are Freeman and Keaton charming enough that anybody would want to
watch them rifle through Classifieds and house hunt for 90 minutes?
Because that's all you're going to get from low-risk dramedy 5 Flights Up.
Freeman and Keaton
play septuagenarian couple Alex and Ruth, who have decided to sell their
beautiful Brooklyn apartment after 40 years of building memories there. Why?
The city is changing all around them; the old stores are gone, replaced by cool
and hip chains that are attracting younger people to the city. The biggest
problem is the five flights of stairs they must climb every day, which is
getting to be too much in their older age. So they hire their pit bull of a
niece (Cynthia Nixon) to help find a buyer while setting out to locate a new
place to live. There's your movie. No seriously, that's it. Okay, there's a
go-nowhere subplot involving their cute dog Daisy's trip to the vet, and
something about a terrorist rampaging through the streets snarling traffic and
driving away potential buyers. Neither of these move the story needle one bit,
though, but then again nothing really does.
In comic books there is something called
"decompression". It's a storytelling technique where minor events are
dragged out in order to stretch a storyline, and thus sell more books. More
time, less actual content. 5
Flights Up is the cinematic
equivalent of "decompression". Ruth and Alex have their little
squabbles, usually about his negativity towards the idea of moving, and they
all end with them falling more in love with one another than before. There's so
little tension between them that at one point Ruth has to announce, "We're
having an argument!” It's perfectly okay that they are an extremely happily
married couple, but their tiny problems don't hold any real weight. Nothing
really threatens their happiness, except for the line of jerk New York
stereotypes who attend their Open House. Director Richard Loncraine (of the
unfortunate tennis comedy Wimbledon)
lays on the sappiness thick and syrupy.
At the same time, it's difficult to
outright crush this film because Freeman and Keaton are so enjoyable together.
They have the easy chemistry of a married couple who have been through a lot
and have come to accept the other's flaws. There's no romantic chemistry,
though, and any passion between Ruth and Alex is seen in flashback to their
early encounters. Young Alex (Korey Jackson) was just starting out as an artist
while Ruth (Claire van der Boom) was his muse. Jackson and van der Boom bear
striking resemblances to their counterparts, and it's through them that we see
the troubles Ruth and Alex endured as an interracial couple. She also suffers
from fertility problems while he struggles to forge a career.
This is all based on a novel by JillCiment, and it's unfathomable that anybody would read this motionless story
without the benefit of Freeman and Keaton. We may be willing to watch
them in just about anything, but 5
Flights Up is too far of a climb for this.
Rating: 2 out of 5
