On Golden Pond (1981)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

This here is an interesting film. It's got good dialogue, good acting, interesting relatable relationship themes, makes for a poignant take on life and death, and provides the framework as a story and plot and film ultimately to deliver those strong points.But I believe it's overrated in how this was cinema giant Henry Fonda's last gig, added his own real-life daughter plays the role of his daughter in the film and had other cinema-legend Katharine Hepburn playing alongside him...this film has harvested more credit than is due (thanks to status).It's a good film, but it's flawed. It's not nearly as powerful and profound a story or experience as one would have you think, like, at all - and is trying to establish more than its frame can intrinsically handle. There's as if a shortcut between what the film-makers meant to establish as far as morality and ideas and themes, and what actually happens. Like there's too much intended for too little in the story. You need to provide the items in the plot to produce those big powerful moments, and the film only settles for fairly underwhelming events.Good film, but not great. 7/10.

On Golden Pond deserves the title of "something you don't see every day". Movies which deal with old age don't usually become box office hits in a world obsessed with being young, yet On Golden Pond became the 2nd highest grossing film of 1981. Plus it stars two elderly actors who hadn't appeared in a major box office picture in over a decade.Despite their six decades in the industry, not only was it the first time Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn starred in a film together but they the first time they had even met each other. I never ceased to be amazed by the longevity of the careers of these two actors, especially Henry Fonda, whom I consider to have the most impress careers of any actor I've come across, scoring great films in every decade from the 30's right up to the 80's. On Golden Pond would be his last film and what a way to end a career. On Golden Pond reflects Fonda's real life relationship with his children. Reportedly the man was emotionally distant from his children, as are characters of Norman and his daughter Chelsea (Jane Fonda) in On Golden Pond. It makes you wonder how much of the interactions between the Fondas in the film are genuine with their intentionally forced and un-naturalistic manner of speaking to each other. Yet Norman will accidently utter Chelsea's name at several points showing that deep down he really cares about her. Also what's up with the bikini shots Jane Fonda? Was she trying to promote her exercise videos?Norman Thayer actually reminds me of my own grandfather in how he enjoys screwing with people's minds, such as the scene in which his future son in law tries to ask him if he would have a problem with having sex with his wife in their house. Norman Thayer seems like a stereotypical old man at first but we grow to empathize with his character. Just look at that battered old face of his which manages to say so much while his cranky, grump, smart aleck old man shtick helps the ease the likeability of his character. Norman is a man nearing the end of his life played by a man who literally was nearing the end of his life. Compared to Henry Fonda's appearance in the film Meteor which he stared in two years earlier, he aged quite a lot in that short period of time.Katharine Hepburn is one badass old lady in On Golden Pond. Just look at the scene in which jumps of a boat and into a lake to save her husband and nephew and doing he own stunts too. She also reportedly told Jane Fonda on set that she hated her but watching their scenes together you'd never know it but she's Kate, she can hate whoever she wants. Plus it's nifty to hear old stars curse, as well as flipping the bird. Norman and Ethel Thayer represent the old couple I believe most people would strive to be, married for decades but still madly in love with each other as ever.

Getting old is tough but beats the alternative. Putting as nice a bow on that situation as possible is the mission of this comedy- drama about an aging couple taking in life at their summer cottage; for me, a sturdy if low-key pleasure.Approaching his 80th birthday, retired professor Norman Thayer, Jr. (Henry Fonda) finds himself forgetting things. A lot of things. About the only thing he can remember is that he's standing at the edge of his actuarial table, and the more he brings up this fact, the more it annoys his longtime wife Ethel (Katharine Hepburn). The arrival of their daughter Chelsea (Jane Fonda) adds friction to the pot."I think I'll start a new book so I can finish it before I'm finished myself," Norman tells Chelsea's new boyfriend Bill Ray (Dabney Coleman). When he picks up one he's read before, he just shrugs: "My mind is going, so it'll all be new to me."This kind of humor pops up a lot in "On Golden Pond," which along with the beautiful Billy Williams cinematography and immersive set design, make it a kind of destination spot among movies. You don't watch it for story or even character development as much as an amiable place where quiet, rueful beauty reigns. An opening shot of the title lake (set in Maine, filmed in New Hampshire) transformed into burnished copper by a rising (or setting) sun is pure heaven.The syrup runs pretty thick on this pancake. Director Mark Rydell does a fine job recreating the Thayers' quiet pattern of life, but occasionally reaches for a bigger moment that isn't there, like Norman trying to find his way out of some woods. Composer Dave Grusin gets so busy with his trills and minor chords, he never develops an engaging central melody. Hepburn delivers one of her typical kabuki performances, with much too much eye-flashing and hand-waving.She's not one of my favorite actors, but here at least she has the right counterweight in Henry Fonda. He has the Norman character down so well it never feels like acting with him. You see the pain and fear in his eyes, but when he talks, it's in a low growl with W. C. Fields overtones. As Hepburn pushes, he pulls back, and the result feels like you are watching a real couple who have been together for decades, not a pair of movie stars who never met before this shoot.He has many great scenes here. My favorite is the awkward comedy when he teases Bill Ray about sleeping with his daughter, a scene Coleman also plays very well. It's odd seeing Coleman acting so awkward and uncomfortable, given the hard-case types he usually plays, but it's easy to understand with Old Man Thayer giving him the third degree. He should have done light comedy more often.The real-life situation of making "On Golden Pond" was at least as interesting as the movie. They shot it on location and around an actors' strike, and the set was apparently a tense one. A commentary track with screenwriter Ernest Thompson is especially illuminating and candid, talking about the challenges of reconfiguring his Broadway play around a cast and director who didn't always share his vision. At times, you can see where they got it right, especially in the second-half scenes where Norman teaches chippy young Billy Ray (Doug McKeon) about fishing on the lake. Overall, they went for a more dramatic flavor than the play had, and seem to get the balance right; a bit soppy, a bit heavy, affecting in the right places but never overbearing.Much of the talk about this movie centers around the troubled real- life relationship Fonda had with his daughter, something I feel is a burden to "On Golden Pond." For one thing, it's a distraction to the Thayer situation the film is supposed to be about. For another, the relationship between father and daughter, whether Thayer or Fonda, isn't so much developed or resolved as it is waved aside in a wink and a hug. I didn't care about Chelsea at the end of the film and doubt anyone else did, either.What "On Golden Pond" does offer is atmosphere, and a lot of it. The interiors of the Thayer house are so marvelously furnished and lit, I just want to hang out inside them and listen to Norman grouse at whoever has the misfortune of visiting, as long as it's not me.

"On Golden Pond" works through the same themes that occupied many big-time play adaptations between the 1950s and the 1980s. Like "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958) and "The Lion in Winter" (1968) it is about inter- generational family dysfunction, and it seems to want to embarrass or shock the audience through a frankness of discourse. It is the kind of script that purports to peel away the supposedly-artificial niceties of middle-class life to get to the meat of matters, which in the minds of these kinds of playwrights always seems to mean sex and death. Tennessee Williams and James Goldman made that format dance, and watching the great Hollywood versions of their works is thrilling because of the way they constantly try to set new records for speed and intensity and brutal honesty. "On Golden Pond" imitates these classics but with a lower degree of commitment. It's slower and gentler, and it never seems to let a barb stand unaccompanied by a sappy line or a nostalgic musical cue. It's a movie that's easy to like, because it's a suger-coated pill. As Williams and Goldman knew, there's nothing challenging about a sugar-coated pill. To them, the purpose of writing characters who speak in a forthright way about difficult issues was to make us face our fears and anxieties, and their genius was to do this while also being entertaining. "On Golden Pond" wants to do these things, but it wants to go down easy. That impulse is not altogether a bad one; compare it with another play adaptation, 1966's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," which aims to scream the loudest and cut the deepest only to end up as thoroughly unlikable as its characters. Toward the beginning, "On Golden Pond" echoes "Virginia Woolf" as Henry Fonda's irascible "old poop" tries to discomfit a polite younger man with blunt sexual talk. By the middle of the movie, though, this riff on Edward Albee's hard-edged approach gives way to a much sweeter narrative about an unlikely friendship between Fonda's 80-year-old and a 13-year-old boy. It's nice, but it's predictable and safe and familiar and forgettable whereas its predecessors succeeded by being none of those things. Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda are believable, though, and Jane Fonda threatens to upstage both of them as their adult daughter whose eyes betray an inner mixture of depression and resentment and a certain flightiness born of self-doubt. If nothing else, what "On Golden Pond" shares in full measure with its more ambitious and significant forerunners is magnificent acting by a top-shelf cast.