A rogue elder, an uptight junior, the open road and amoral life lesson idling at the finish line – it’s afamiliar handful of ingredients, andNorthbound mixes them exactly as you’d expect. William Scoular’s feel-good, often very funny romp across the North American plains keeps the road trip rolling along nicely, even when you can see every fork in it coming amile off.
Bruce Dern is the obvious pull here. He plays Arthur, adistillery-founding octogenarian who gets booted from his care home after aboozy golf-cart joyride. Dern brings the same flinty menace that earned him an Oscar nod forNebraska, just softened slightly around the edges. He’s magnetic enough that you find yourself wishing the film let him off the leash alittle more often. Arthur is determined to get back to the ex-wife he supposedly never stopped loving (Joanna Cassidy), and the whisky business he built from nothing. He somehow ropes his conflict-averse grandson, Kevin (Hunter Parrish), into driving the two thousand-odd miles from Arizona to Canada. Cue ninety minutes of generational sparring, most memorably when Kevin dismisses the Round Table of King Arthur as “a circle-jerk of toxic masculinity.”
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The film picks up nicely when Adrien (Julia Fox) shows up as ahitchhiker with afake disability and abig secret. It’s quite the pivot from the glitzy drama of her breakout featureUncut Gems, but Fox is awelcome jolt of unpredictability. For awhile, it seems as thoughNorthbound might swerve somewhere more interesting, but Adrien’s storyline is quickly tidied away before it can complicate anything. Her character ends up feeling like the film’s biggest missed opportunity – alongside abrief cameo from the late Graham Greene – areminder of just how much talent this film has assembled and how little it asks of most ofit.
It’s ahandsome trip, at least, with sweeping shots of tree-lined highways and great lakes passing by the car window. Scoular falls back on asoundtrack of oldies, with needle-drops so on-the-nose they sometimes border on parody. When the tearful farewell finally arrives, it is accompanied by the likes of Keane’s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ and M83’s ‘Wait’, bangers worn thin from adecade of doing the same job in ahundred other films.
It’s ashame afilm with this cast and this potential chose not to aim higher. There’s alingering sense that aspikier version ofNorthboundwas well within reach, willing to let its elders raise abit more hell. Even so, this is afunny, tender tale of reconciliation between agrandfather and his grandson. Dern remains atotal joy, and there’s an authentic chemistry between him and Parrish that carries the film through its weaker patches. It’s apleasant enough ride – warm, watchable and happy to colour inside the lines – just don’t expect any sudden turns.