Can you imagine anything more delightful than Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin co-starring in a movie with Richard Roundtree and Malcolm McDowell … in 1972? That was the year Fonda won an Oscar for “Klute” and daffy “Laugh-In” star Tomlin released her first comedy album. The two men were riding high with “Shaft” and “A Clockwork Orange,” respectively. Just think what an ensemble film that played to each of their strengths might have yielded 50 years ago.
That’s wishful thinking, of course. You can’t go back, and you can’t do things over, but it’s never too late to move on. At least, that’s the message writer-director Paul Weitz is peddling in “Moving On,” a sassy feature-length sitcom with a #MeToo twist in which two estranged friends reunite to settle a decades-old score.
Weitz started his career with “American Pie” — which introduced the word “MILF” to the English language — and has basically made a career telling decent, disposable stories of stunted maturity ever since (“About a Boy,” “Admission,” “Being Flynn”). His one truly great film was a generation-spanning, abortion-themed indie called “Grandma,” which he wrote for Tomlin, and which every judge in America could stand to watch right now. This latest project is obviously an excuse for them to collaborate again.
These days, it’s not such a surprise to see Fonda and Tomlin together. They’re seven seasons into “Grace and Frankie,” and they have such good comedic chemistry that their first feature collaboration comes as more of a comfort than a surprise: a “grumpy old broads” comedy, in the tradition of Matthau and Lemmon, where they play Claire (Fonda) and Evelyn (Tomlin), two college roommates reunited for the funeral of a friend. We expect them to act out, and they don’t waste much time doing so.
“I’m going to kill you,” Claire threatens the dead woman’s husband, Howard (McDowell), the moment she walks in the door. A few minutes later, Evelyn shows up drunk and makes an even bigger entrance, interrupting Howard’s eulogy. Then, the next day, she drops a bombshell at the memorial, announcing that the beloved wife and mother whom they’ve just buried was her lover.
Claire really does intend to kill Howard, and the rest of the movie’s 80-odd minutes are spent alternating between that plan (it’s harder than Second Amendment advocates might like to buy a murder weapon in the state of California) and dealing with unfinished business, like patching things up with ex-husband Ralph (Roundtree), whom she divorced without explanation all those years ago.
Tomlin is here mostly as emotional support and comedic relief: to ask the main character whether she really wants to murder someone and to support her decision, whatever that might be. That was essentially Tomlin’s role in “Grandma” as well, without making any moral equivalencies between abortion and manslaughter. She’s a modern-minded lesbian who does what she wants and supports others’ right to do the same — a mentality that extends to the visiting boy she meets in the halls of her retirement home, encouraging this effeminate kid’s desire to play dress-up and telling him how beautiful he is.
Tomlin’s terrific in this mode. The script is as bland as the “cardboard” they serve in her rest-home cafeteria, but she manages to inject it with vinegar and attitude, while embracing the realities of aging. Getting older doesn’t mean giving up, Evelyn reminds; it means finding a fresh way to laugh off life’s litany of disappointments. Evelyn may roll her eyes and call Claire names — like “cuckoo” and “crazy” — but she was the only person Claire told about how Howard forced himself on her.
The assault destabilized Claire’s life, destroyed her marriage, and went unreported all these years. That’s a hell of a thing to play — not the borderline-slapstick business of buying a gun and aiming it at a man who’s been living with a different memory of the same incident for decades, but the trauma shared by so many women who’ve had to “move on” without justice. Weitz spares us a reenactment of what happened. It’s Claire’s word against Howard’s, though no one in the audience will have trouble distinguishing the truth.
Fonda doesn’t overplay it. This is not an Oscar movie, and she has no interest in trying to outdo Jodie Foster’s big Charles Bronson turn in “The Brave One.” It’s just a question of what she chooses to do about it. Laughter can be just as cathartic as violence. You’ll never believe the weapon Claire winds up with. When that fails, she’s willing to resort to smothering him with a pillow or running him over with a car.
By that point, you may find yourself wishing someone with a darker sense of humor, like Danny DeVito (“Throw Momma From the Train”), was behind the camera. To his credit, Weitz sees the beauty and enduring sex appeal of these two women — “grand-MILFs,” the movie all but labels them — and celebrates them. We’ve been spoiled this past decade, discovering what Fonda and Tomlin can do together. Why didn’t Hollywood see the potential of this pairing half a century earlier?
