I was often struck, watching writer-director Robert Benton’s Nobody’s Fool (1994), by how much less convincing it would be if Paul Newman weren’t at the front of it. The dynamic between families and townspeople in its cozy, snow-choked main setting — a New York village called North Bath — tends to feel more quaint and rosily hard-edged when you presume Benton would rather things strike us as a little more pungent. And the narrative, mostly finding Newman’s forever-fuck-up character uncovering by chance a happy new chapter in his life after years of thinking it was probably too late for things like that, is rote.
But when Newman interacts with the ensemble, things suddenly are imbued with a lived-in quality I don’t think would be there without him. And because Newman so efficiently and likably embodies this seen-it-before character type — the rather gruff old man whose heart is more golden than you’d at first think — we’re not mad to get the happy ending the roteness tacitly promises.
In Nobody’s Fool, Newman plays a 60-something named Sully who’s led the sort of life that could be summed up in just a few sentences. He’s the type of guy who’s lived in the same place all his life and never really grew up as a result. No major career path was ever taken. His only marriage, the kind embarked on because that was just the thing to do, ended with a divorce and an estrangement from his now-grown son. His days mostly consist of doing odd jobs for a local contractor, Carl (Bruce Willis), with whom he’s often at odds because of unfair (or lack of) payment and drinking and card playing. His closest friend is probably Beryl (Jessica Tandy), the old woman who lets him rent a room in her house mostly because she likes his company. (She first met him as one of his 8th-grade teachers.) You sense from the twinkle in Sully’s eyes that his stubbornness is the result of a man too smart and in tune with himself to settle for a life he doesn’t want — to play by the unspoken societal rules he considers bullshit. He’d be a fool to live a lie.
Sully’s heart will do some softening in Nobody’s Fool, though. He’s thinking about his mortality a little more lately. Age-related injuries are becoming more common while working; there’s some poignant consideration of the legacy his own father left behind, too. He’s also given the chance to redefine his status as an absentee father. Shortly into the movie, Sully’s son, Peter (Dylan Walsh), arrives unannounced in North Bath with his young son and a wife (Catherine Dent) with whom a divorce seems imminent. Peter hasn’t seen Sully in something like three years, though quickly clear is that the former’s natural resentment about having a father not there as much as he ought to have been isn’t so powerful that he’s averse to reconnection when it presents itself. Sully tries out that reconnection because why not; he also gets to better know the grandson who doesn’t recognize him when they first see each other. The suggestion is that this new affinity building with the child is a do-over moment — a requiem for the father he probably should have been.
Nobody’s Fool feels most substantial when exploring all this. But since it’s as much interested in being a character study as a small-town dramedy, there are a handful of sitcommish subplots thrown in. (The movie is so amiable that nothing doesn’t ever go down easy; the cutesy musical cues, though, aren’t exempt from that generalization.) Sully’s ongoing feud with Carl is egged on by lots of lawsuits brought against the latter by the former with a way of getting dismissed. Carl also often steals Sully’s snowblower, which engenders some comic fending off of dogs trained to be nasty. There’s an ongoing flirtation between Sully and Carl’s long-suffering wife, Toby (Melanie Griffith); maybe they’ll run away together, maybe they won’t. Sully is always tormenting a dumb young cop (Philip Seymour Hoffman) mostly because he’s young and dumb and fun to fuck with. There’s a continuous threat that Sully is going to be kicked out of his home, mostly because Beryl’s ghoulish banker son thinks she’d be better off selling her house and moving into an assistance-living facility.
Some of these subplots naturally work better than others; I most took to the stuff with Toby — the dimmed, taken-for-granted luminousness Griffith gives her makes her one of the film’s most affecting characters — and with Beryl, who like Sully stays spirited in the face of waning mortality.
Nobody’s Fool has such a sturdy foundation in Newman that we’re never having a bad time, and never unaware that what he’s doing with this low-key performance is special. So many movie stars lose much of the ebullience that defined the earlier parts of their careers. The image of their past self can morph into a specter, never again able to be lived up to. But with age, Newman seemed only to become more empathetic, more skillfully understated, an actor. Nobody’s Fool sees him doing some of his best, most moving work, his ebullience evolving right alongside him.
Peterson Reviews 