Bridges and Lithgow bring the personal to the action-thriller ‘The Old Man’
The story of the man at the center of Bridge and Lithgow’s The Old Man (out June 3) is a little twisted.
In order to set up his father’s new construction company, John Oldman (Matthew Goode) makes a deal with an eccentric older millionaire who wants to use the land that lies beneath his father’s home to expand his property empire. But Oldman’s father has some ideas of his own — ideas he is willing to die for.
The Old Man is a big-budget action thriller set in Bridge and Lithgow’s rural and isolated town of Lithgow, on the edge of the Gippsland Lakes — a place that feels like a cross between the U.S. Southwest and the Australian Outback. The story is set in the 1970s, and in a town where the past is often a little scary in a way that just isn’t realistic for the modern world.
“The Old Man” is a lot like “The Piano,” one of Bridge and Lithgow’s movies that took audiences by surprise.
The story started out as a short screenplay — “The Old Man” is one of the more unusual features in the company’s catalog — but it grew into a full-length feature that won the prestigious Grand Jury prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2016 and that weaves a bit of romance, intrigue, and a twisted sense of humor into the story of a man whose father has built a company from the ground up that threatens to destroy a lot of people.
There’s a lot of strange and weird stuff going on in Lithgow, and some of the twists and turns in The Old Man feel like a real stretch, maybe a bit too intense to be believable.
“The Old Man” stars Matthew Goode as John Oldman, a young man who moves into the Old Man
