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Intimacy in Later Life

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03Oct

Last Chance Harvey

Last Chance Harvey (Hopkins, 2008) tells the story of an older musician, Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman), long ago divorced and somewhat estranged from his daughter, finding new love when he travels to London to attend his daughter’s wedding.
02Oct

Cloud 9

Cloud 9 (Dresen, 2008) is an extraordinary film from Germany that, in a way, bridges the gap between films that portray new love in later life and films that explore long-term love in later life.
03Aug

I’ll See You in My Dreams

Based on the verbal descriptions I had seen, I was ready to not like this film. My assumption: another film on the woes of dating and attaching in late life. While that is part of this film’s content, there is more, much more.  And it is the more that slowly develops, and envelops, until the very last frames of this well-made film.
06Dec

Love Is Strange

Of all the stories we enjoy hearing and seeing in films, stories about love—or the lack of it—seem to be at the top of the list. Try to think for a moment of a film that tells a story without any love-related component.
03Aug

Backseat Bingo

For those too young to remember, “Backseat Bingo” is a 1950’s term for light sexual activity (or more) that occurs in the back seat of a vehicle. Liz Blazer’s Backseat Bingo is a 6-min animated documentary that invites a handful of retired elders to share their personal attitudes and values about sex, romance, and aging.
03Jun

Last Love

When an older man and a younger woman are drawn to each other in a movie, red flags pop up. We expect to go down the typical road of mutual, or perhaps, one-way exploitation in the relationship.
07Oct

The Mayor

The Mayor is a film that should be viewed by every serious student of gerontology. In a display of remarkable trust, selected residents of Town Village North, a retirement community in Dallas, TX, share their daily lives—public and private thoughts, feelings, and activities—with brilliant documentarian Jared Scheib. The most intimate focus is placed upon 88-year-old Sam Berger, called “the Mayor” by other residents because of his irrepressible social largess.
05Dec

Hope Springs

In the film, Hope Springs, Nebraska residents Arnold and Kay have been married for 31 years. Each morning, Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) marches into the kitchen, places his suit coat and briefcase on a chair, and is served the same breakfast by Kay (Meryl Streep) which he eats behind the newspaper. Each night he falls asleep in front of an “improving your golf” program on TV and is woken up by Kay, after which they say good night and retire to their separate bedrooms. As trite and stereotypical as these early scenes in the film are, they do quickly establish the context out of which the movie unfolds
Movies About Aging and Elderhood