Harold and Raymond’s growing affection for Victoria gives her a sense of self-worth, which proves crucial when her vanished (and abusive) boyfriend, comes briefly back into her life. Some of Haruf’s best passages trace with precision and delicacy the ways in which, gradually, the gentle, the lonely brothers and Victoria begin to adapt to each other and then, over the course of Victoria’s pregnancy, to form a resilient family unit. Maggie places Victoria with the McPheron brothers, an arrangement that Guthrie, a friend of both Maggie and the McPherons, supports. When her bitter mother locks her out, she turns to Maggie Jones, a compassionate teacher and a neighbor, for help. Victoria, pretty, insecure, uncertain of her own worth, has allowed herself to be seduced by a weak, spoiled lout who quickly disappears. Haruf (Where You Once Belonged, 1989, etc.) believably draws these various incomplete or troubled figures together. Harold and Raymond McPheron, two aging but self-reliant cattle ranchers, are haunted by their imaginings of what they may have missed in life by electing never to get married, never to strike out on their own. Victoria Roubideaux, a high-school senior, is thrown out of her house when her mother discovers she’s pregnant. Among the several damaged families in this beautifully cadenced and understated tale is that of Tom Guthrie, a high-school history teacher in small Holt, Colorado, who’s left to raise his two young sons, Ike and Bobby, alone when his troubled wife first withdraws from them and then, without explanation, abandons them altogether. When they step out, hand-in hand, into the daylight, they look just as beautiful as they ever did.A stirring meditation on the true nature and necessity of the family. Overnight, in the dark, Louis and Addie murmur their secrets and tend their wounds. But it also provides them with fresh challenges allows them ample room to stretch and breathe and find their range. ![]() There’s something moving about the sight of these two 60s poster-children grown old and careworn, and Batra’s film no doubt is trading on that. ![]() They keep the film honest when it turns more conventional and pitches towards soap opera. ![]() Both give performances of such quiet conviction that it scarcely looks like acting at all. It is a graceful, easygoing September song of a film, complete with slide guitar and autumn leaves the perfect late showcase for Redford and Fonda, more than 50 years after they appeared together in The Chase. And then all of a sudden they’re not news anymore, just another elderly couple pottering down Main Street.īatra made his reputation with The Lunchbox, a charming Mumbai-set romance, and Our Souls at Night shares the same connective tissue. His film is at its most affecting during these hushed exchanges, in the weeks before Louis and Addie take the relationship out of doors, thrilling the curtain-twitchers and rubberneckers and the gossipy old crocks down at Frederick’s cafe. Batra cleverly frames these encounters as an intimate dialogue, like My Night With Maude or a co-counselling session in which the participants are candid and direct in a way they could never otherwise be. He tells her of his extramarital affair and of his failed ambition to become a painter and she in turn tells him about her infant daughter, who was killed on the road. “Talk to me,” she says, once they are sitting in bed, and this is just what Louis does.
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