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Younger and Younger (9-Dec-1993)
Director: Percy Adlon Writers: Percy Adlon; Felix O. Adlon Keywords: Drama, Comedy
REVIEWS Review by Phil (posted on 17-Feb-2008) If what makes a movie great is touching on some basic part of the human psyche, Younger and Younger is nearly a great movie. It has two great elements: one, taking the ordinary urban landscape in which millions of people live today and making it seem embued with significance; and two, exploring the magic between men and women that grows from the physical beauty of a young woman.
The story takes place in a storage facility, but one which, somehow, has become a community of a variety of people who seem to have nowhere else to spend the day, nor, magically, the financial need to be anywhere else. Donald Sutherland plays the lord of this magical kingdom. It is a vision of what society might be if we were not all the wage slaves that the modern economy has required us to be: a place where people come and spend the day as themselves, however eccentric that self may be. It is a bleak, industrial, cement-walled part of Los Angeles, yet with its collage of characters and eccentrics, seems warm and inviting.
Donald Sutherland is a stylish older gentleman, the owner of the storage facility, who never leaves home without his brilliant white suit. His wife, the more practical one who keeps the details of the business under control, is played, in a fat suit, by Lolita Davidovich. It is fascinating to watch Davidovich, a woman at the height of her young beauty when this was made in 1993, play the role of a forty-ish, fat, faded woman depressed by her own diminished appeal. To cut to the point of the plot, Davidovich dies of a heart attack brought on the the stress of Sutherland's womanizing with more attactive women. Then a ghost story begins, which is fascinating in that Davidovich is allowed to become more beautiful in each ghostly re-appearance, the point of which, in the plot, is to torment the philandering Sutherland. It is fascinating to watch a beautiful woman play a homely woman, and it is more fascinating still to watch the fat make up slowly disappear and the beautiful woman re-appear. It is also engaging to watch the philandering Sutherland suddenly re-awaken to his dead wife's beauty.
This is an under-rated, under-appreciated and under-watched film. Anyone who likes movies should see this picture.
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