TV SPOTLIGHT Cronyn and Gardenia star in 'Age-Old Friends'
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from June 1992.
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Hume Cronyn stars as widower John Cooper, the eyes and ears of the story, who is afraid to leave his room at the Twin Pines Retirement Home after a bad fall. He spends his days trying to shock the nurses with sexual banter and obsessing about the possible onset of senility, which has gradually reduced some of the other residents to "zombies." His cherished partner is Michael Aylott (Vincent Gardenia), who works with Cooper in mental exercises to guard against zombiehood. Cronyn's real-life daughter, Tandy, plays his daughter in the drama, whose regular visits to Twin Pines create more friction than harmony between father and daughter. It's hard to take Cooper's rantings about decrepitude and the hard life of the infirm seriously, considering the utopian aspect of his retirement home. It almost looks like a boarding school with its attentive staff and jovial clubbiness. A more accurate portrayal of the loneliness and antiseptic impersonality of the nursing homes most of our elderly are confined to would have greatly increased the force of this film's message.
• In "Darkman" (NBC, June 15), Liam Neeson stars as Peyton Westlake, an eminent scientist whose laboratory is destroyed by gangsters and who decides to reconstruct it to avenge himself upon the wrongdoers. The catch is that his face was destroyed along with his equipment, so he becomes Darkman, a shadowy figure who sometimes wears a temporary flesh mask to assume any identity he chooses. The movie starts out with a driving forcefulness as it establishes its characters in a blaze of novel action and dynamic camerawork. As it winds down to a close, however, the movie begins relying too much on comic relief that doesn't suit the action.
• As a private eye with chutzpah in "V.I. Warshawski" (Showtime, June 20), Kathleen Turner tried to impersonate Gena Rowlands' classic performance in "Gloria." Turner is no Gena Rowlands.
