A once-peaceful frontier town becomes a den of vice after vicious outlaw Dutch Albert and his gang arrive and begin gunning down their opposition. Undertaker Patrick Tate must now choose between the blood money he makes burying the murderers' victims and the threats he and his family face as the death toll continues to rise.... (Full plot summary below)
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A once-peaceful frontier town becomes a den of vice after vicious outlaw Dutch Albert and his gang arrive and begin gunning down their opposition. Undertaker Patrick Tate must now choose between the blood money he makes burying the murderers' victims and the threats he and his family face as the death toll continues to rise.
Leave your thoughts about Never Grow Old.
| ObserverRex ReedIt’s too monstrous and mean-spirited to please everyone unconditionally, but I found it challenging and honest — and hair-raising enough to work as a modern morality tale in cowboy boots. |
| Screen InternationalFionnuala HalliganA classic, if downbeat, addition to the canon. |
| Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperA well-made, rough-edged and solid frontier fable with a distinctive look and fine performances all around. |
| Los Angeles TimesNoel MurrayNever Grow Old isn’t a top-shelf western, but it’s thoughtfully made, with something to say about how even in a country that encourages rugged individualism, community matters. |
| The Hollywood ReporterFrank ScheckWearing the proverbial black hat and speaking his menacing lines in a husky, near-whisper, Cusack thoroughly galvanizes the proceedings. |
| Film ThreatAlex SavelievIvan Kavanagh has an eye for style and a clear gift for building suspense. That said, the film is sadly less than the sum of its frequently-impressive parts. If nothing else, his messy, violent, dark and sad reflection of our society proves that the Western will never grow old. |
| Movie NationRoger MooreKavanagh’s second coup was in giving this too-familiar tale just the right star power, with the criminally under-used Hirsch shining as our anti-hero and Cusack, settling into the playing-the-heavy part of his career with as much wit as he can muster. |
| RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyAs revisionist as it might aspire to be, Never Grow Old is rife with clichés, Cusack’s philosophical villain one of the most conspicuous. |
| User ReviewFelixTheBarberIf you like the pacing of a drama western, then this is a good one to watch. First, the bad. John Cusack, although not horrible,does not necessarily nail his role. He brings a certain mystery but it never becomes any more than him being a complete evil bastard. Also the plot was a bit predictable, yet i still enjoyed it. Now the good. Emile Hirsch nails his performance and does what he does best with acting with his facial expressions. He is very good at delivering lines with his eyes without muttering a word. When he does speak he is believable and his irish accent is on point. Overall i thoroughly enjoyed this movie more than i expected to. It was engauging until the end and i recomend it to people who enjoy westerns or drama. The visuals in this movie can be quite stunning. |
| User ReviewBertaut1Ugly, bleak, gritty, and enjoyable I guarantee you've seen this story before – a good man who either abhors or has renounced violence forced to take up arms so as to protect the innocent from a villain. You can find it deployed in westerns such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Firecreek (1968), and in genre films as varied as Collateral (2004) and Death Sentence (2007). Filmed in Connemara (standing in for Oregon), Never Grow Old is the latest to roll out that narrative template. And although the script isn't going win any awards for originality, the film has been put together with undeniable craft. It's bleak and gritty, and whilst it won't change your life, it is rather enjoyable. Oregon, 1849; the town of Garlow is governed by the local Methodist preacher, Pike (Danny Webb), who has forbidden alcohol, gambling, and prostitution. On the edge of town, the town's undertaker, Irish immigrant Patrick Tate (Emile Hirsch) and his wife, French immigrant Audrey (Déborah François), along with their two children, lead a simple life. That changes when Christopher 'Dutch' Albert (John Cusack) and his men roll into town looking for a man who stole from Dutch. After finding him, Dutch decides to stay in Garlow, procuring a group of prostitutes and reopening the saloon, killing anyone who crosses him. With his undertaker business thriving because of the spike in violence, Tate stays out of things as best he can, although Audrey is disgusted that he's prospering because of Dutch. Soon, however, Tate's family will come under threat and he'll be forced to decide what he must do. Thematically, the idea of paradise awaiting us in the next life, specifically the notion that the afterlife will be a lot better than our earthly existence, is alluded to throughout the film. And it's really not too hard to imagine a better life than the one writer/director Ivan Kavanagh presents in Garlow, which is literally a one-road town. However, this isn't the parched, dusty environment of beige, yellow, and light browns that we're all used to seeing in westerns. Rather, it's bleak and forlorn; the buildings are dark brown, almost black, the clouds hardly ever part, it rains a lot, and the road itself is nothing but mud. The life of a European in the Americas of the 19th century wasn't easy, and one of the film's most successful elements is in showing us some of why that was. Never Grow Old has the structure of a morality tale or a Mystery play, looking at issues such as religious hypocrisy and self-righteousness. It even takes time to briefly address the Native American genocide, with Pike sermonising about how the colonists saved the land from "savages". The most obvious theme, however, is greed. Tate is complicit with Dutch's violence insofar as he accepts and ignores it, even profiting indirectly because of it. Audrey and several of the town's more religious folk are disgusted with this, and there are multiple references to Tate getting his "30 pieces of silver". A recurring motif is to cut from Dutch killing someone to Tate cleaning the body to hiding his payment away in a tin buried in the house. When we first see the tin, there's little in it, but as the film goes on, it becomes fuller and fuller. Indeed, the film has several visual moments like this which convey thematic points sans dialogue. The opening shot, for example, shows a tattered American flag hanging on a burnt building, immediately introducing the theme of violence. In another early shot, we see Pike preaching to a packed church. Later, however, after Dutch has reopened the saloon, Pike's church is shown to be almost empty, making reference to the dwindling church attendance that we're seeing today. Another nice visual touch is that the saloon is directly across the road from the church, symbolising the battle between hedonism and piety that continues to this day. In terms of problems, the script isn't exactly original, with every character an archetype we've seen before. Additionally, Emile Hirsch joins a list of actors who have completely butchered the Irish accent; everyone from Tom Cruise to Tommy Lee Jones to Val Kilmer to Brad Pitt. Hirsch isn't as bad as any of these, but his tendency to drop in and out of the inflections on a word-by-word basis is distracting. Another slight issue is that towards the end of the film, Dutch starts reading from the Bible, quoting Revelation 19:17. It's more than a little on the nose, and really, a villain quoting Revelations is itself a cliché. Overall, however, I enjoyed Never Grow Old far more than I expected. It's bleak and gritty, but it's very well made, with some nicely conceived visual shorthand. An uncompromising look at the harshness of frontier life in the 19th century, the film suggests that stoic individualism is no substitute for a vibrant community. There's nothing here you haven't seen before, but Kavanagh handles the genre elements well and has made a rather enjoyable film. |
