Butler's Cinema Scene

Blythe Danner, John Lithgow

“THE TOMORROW MAN” My rating: C 

94 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Not even the dynamic duo of John Lithgow and Blythe Danner can save “The Tomorrow Man,” a film so determined not to be your typical geriatric love story that it goes way too far in the other direction.

Ed Hemsler (Lithgow) lives in small-town America (it looks like Iowa) and is, to put it mildly, eccentric.

“I just want to be ready,” Ed tells his grown son in a telephone call, and we soon realize what that means.

Ed is a prepper. He has a secret room filled with survival supplies and he watches TV news constantly, looking for signs that it’s time to bunker down.  He’s arrogant, believing that the rest of us are self-deluding nincompoops. He keeps his house spotlessly clean. (Of course, he also imagines that the lady newscaster speaks to him directly.)

Ed isn’t a total loon. He can pass for more-or-less normal on his trips to the store to pick up bottled water, canned tuna and other essentials.

That’s where he spots Ronnie (Danner), a fellow septuagenarian who seems as timorous as Ed is self-assured.  Basically he stalks her (Ed knows his way around the Internet), planning out “accidental” meetings.

She’s cautious but finally receptive, even accompanying Ed to a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner with his son (Derek Cecil), daughter-in-law (Katie Aselton) and rebellious granddaughter (Sophie Thatcher).

Along the way we learn that Ronnie has never gotten over the death of her only child, and that she is a hoarder whose home is as overflowing with junk as Ed’s is spartan.

Written and directed by Noble Jones, who is a  force in music videos (Taylor Swift, Keith Urban), “The Tomorrow Man” deserves props for trying something different.  Only problem is it doesn’t work.

There’s a swift undercurrent of uneasiness running through the film.   Neither of our protagonists is quite all there, and a few moments of cliched silliness (Ed putting Ronnie in a shopping cart and speeding her down the grocery aisles) cannot lift the production’s gloomy pall.

This lurking queasiness keeps us from buying into the Ed/Ronnie romance.

And audiences will be left open-mouthed, bewildered and perhaps a bit pissed by the apocalyptic ending with which Jones wraps up his story.  What the hell?

Lithgow and Danner are, as always, watchable despite their characters’ off-putting baggage.

Better luck next time.

| Robert W. Butler