“The Old Man:” Measured, Methodical and Jeff Bridges Punches Everybody

NAB

article here

The main interest in new FX drama series The Old Man is the old man playing the lead. It’s the Jeff Bridges baggage from his youth in features like The Last Picture Show to his cult Dude for the Coens and grizzled Hollywood veteran in Hell or High Water combined with his brush with Covid and Cancer which seems to enrich the onscreen story.

The Old Man centers on Dan Chase (Bridges) who absconded from the CIA decades ago and has been living off the grid since.  When an assassin arrives and tries to take Chase out, the old operative learns that to ensure his future he now must reconcile his past.

John Lithgow and Amy Brenneman also star in the original created for television by Jonathan Steinberg and Robert Levine.

“What was interesting about this conceit is what happens when you were Jason Bourne 30 years ago,” Steinberg tells The Wrap. “It’s a story that is really about these guys confronting their mortality, especially in the case of Dan Chase. He’s a person who has dodged mortality and felt immune to it in some respect to get through all of the things he’s gotten through and now it’s about what happens when you can’t dodge it anymore and your body is failing you and you’re living alone and your children are grown.”

Littlefield and Steinberg presented the 72-year old Bridges with an undeniably appealing pitch. According to an article at Emmys.com they saw expanding author Thomas Perry's novel into a series as a chance to riff on the themes Clint Eastwood pondered in The Unforgiven, his 1992 Western about a gang of aging outlaws.

“Stylistically, they envisioned something akin to '70s nailbiters like Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation and Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View. Framed in this manner, The Old Man begged for an actor of Bridges's stature. "You don't make Unforgiven with an unknown," Steinberg reasoned. "It immediately felt like a movie-star role.”

Adding to Bridges’ iconic status as a fan-favorite is his lazurus-like come-back from the double whammy of dual disease.

As Margy Rochlin details for Emmys.com the original plan was to shoot the first half of the series on location in LA, then move the production to Morocco to shoot the rest of the episodes. But in March 2020 — four days before leaving for northern Africa, where a unit had already been dispatched and sets were being built — production was forced to shut down due to the pandemic.

Then seven months later, just as filming was about to resume, Bridges, announced he had been diagnosed with lymphoma, and wouldn't be returning until he completed chemotherapy.

After receiving chemotherapy, the actor contracted COVID-19 and spent nearly six weeks in the hospital. “I surrendered to the idea that I might die — that it might be the end of the race,” Bridges said at the show’s premiere, reported in THR. “That’s what’s going to happen to all of us at some point, and maybe this was my time to go through that.”

The show’s premise mines a profitable genre in recent years. Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Liam Neeson and Bob Odenkirk have all played characters retired from the fray and brought reluctantly back to action (with all their spycraft and martial arts nous intact).

For that reason and also because – well, it’s Jeff Bridges – The Old Man gets decent reviews.

“[The show] offers the reliable entertainment value of seeing a silver-haired professional bring his deadly skills to bear against younger opponents,” finds the New York Times. The seriousness of the show’s approach to Chase, and Bridges’s excellence in the role, are what set The Old Man apart, but it’s also a well-above-average if unusually pensive and introspective spy thriller.

Collider thinks the closest reference point of what the series feels like it is going for is the 2010 George Clooney film The American, a work that was essentially an arthouse take on the spy film.  

“This show is often as conflicted as its central figure, grasping at being more character-driven while also dipping into expected action fare. It does this with recurrent fight sequences that, while competently directed and staged, are nowhere near as interesting as the more deliberate moments built around the gravitas of Bridges.”

Rolling Stone agrees. “Even if FX had opted to change the title from to maybe The Dude Abides Murder —The Old Man would still feel somewhat generic,” it found. “The story feels like an afterthought, and the energy level tends to droop whenever Bridges is not getting his homicide on.”