“The Leisure Seeker” gets mediocre reviews at Venice film festival

Several film critics who saw the premiere of “The Leisure Seeker,” starring Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren, at the Venice Film Festival over the weekend gave it middling reviews, but it apparently will be sent to the bigger Toronto Film Festival and essentially has landed worldwide distribution rights in theaters.

The bones of “The Leisure Seeker” comes from Michael Zadoorian’s book of the same title (review here) published in 2009. It was a story of John and Ella Robina, an elderly and ailing couple — he with dementia, she with cancer — who take a madcap, wistful road trip on Route 66 in their old RV, nicknamed the Leisure Seeker.

But, as we reported last summer, the film’s director and producers decided to instead place the couple’s road trip on the East Coast from Boston to Key West, Florida, instead of a Chicago-to-Los Angeles journey on the Mother Road as described in the book.

That news proved disappointing to many Route 66 fans. But if the film becomes even a minor hit or is nominated for an Oscar (which seems likely, given the high-quality casting of its two stars), that will induce a number of movie-goers to seek Zadoorian’s original, Route 66-based book (you can buy it here).

Deborah Young, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, said “not even the normally luminous presence of Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland as loving oldsters can raise this modest tale above the level of an occasional smile.”

A road movie short on comedy and drama should at least offer a keen level of observation, but here insight is scarce and emotional resonance is faint. More of a fizzle than an outright disaster, the film’s star power should anyway get it onto TV, video and airlines after a spin through Venice competition.

Fionnuala Halligan of Screen Daily also didn’t like it much:

[…]It’s a long, long road cluttered with clichés and stalled in softness, pot-holed by its self-serving use of Alzheimer’s as a narrative convenience. […] the dialogue never feels natural even if the warmth is palpably there between their long-married couple, Ella and John.

The Rotten Tomatoes website’s cumulative score for the film is a 40 percent fresh rating. It’s a small sample size, but that grade isn’t good, either.

Another change from the original source material is Sutherland is cast as a retired Massachusetts English professor who quotes James Joyce and spouts poetry at camping spots. It’s a far cry from the book’s John Robina, a more middle-class guy who hails from Michigan.

One reviewer also noted the film shoehorned Donald Trump rallies and racial references into the script to make the film seem more current.

There’s more, but you get the idea — “The Leisure Seeker” diverged from its source material a lot. The script writers were Stephen Amidon, Francesca Archibugi, Francesco Piccolo and director Paolo Virzi. Zadoorian is duly listed as the writer of the novel, and that’s it.

Director Virzi, is no rookie, but it is his first English-language film, which may account for some of its problems.

Variety magazine reported that Focus Features bought the rights to “The Leisure Seeker” for United Kingdom screenings. It will be shown in the U.S. beginning Jan. 19 under Sony Pictures Classics.

(Publicity image from “The Leisure Seeker” via BAC Films)

One thought on ““The Leisure Seeker” gets mediocre reviews at Venice film festival

  1. A true story in book form is one thing. Milking that true story to make a fictional film is another. To me it sounds as if someone wanted two “names” to sell a film that I, at 76, would not want to see. Just who is the hoped for audience?

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