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Edward Cole (Nicholson) is a mean old plutocrat, four times divorced, estranged from his daughter, laying down ruthless rules for the hospitals he owns. Far down the money scale, but superior in all others ways, is Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman), a polymath mechanic, faithful to his wife of 45 years, settled into a lifelong routine of diminished expectations. The only blemish on Carter's record: He smokes. In any movie directed by antitobacco activist Rob Reiner, a cigarette has to be a leading indicator of death...
...plot furniture in Justin Zackham's script - Edward has publicly proclaimed that every sick room in his hospitals must be filled with two patients - these disparate souls end up side by side, each one informed he has only a few months to live. It's as if Edward and Carter had been wheeled in to a UCLA screenwriting class. Here, students, is the movie ploy called "meeting cute" in its purest, weirdest form. What if George Bailey and Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life were forced to endure each other's company for an extended time under extreme...
...Bucket List we learn that, for a lower-middle-class fellow like Carter, there's no death sentence that can't be ameliorated by running into a wealthy guy ready to spend millions of dollars on a Last Holiday. (The 1950 Alec Guinness film of that title, remade in 2006 with Queen Latifah, is one of many precursors to this fantasyland scenario.) The specific lesson to be taken from this doesn't have much practical application, unless the dying start demanding a double room with a billionaire when they check in for their inoperable cancer surgery. But this movie exists...
...Carter has hope because Edward - however deep the Scrooge impulses that have earned him his fortune - is quickly revealed as the sort of super-rich subspecies Hollywood loves: the curmudgeon with a heart of gold. Nicholson played this character in As Good As It Gets; Andy Griffith had a shot at it this year in Waitress. Both are Old Testament deity types who want to spend their largesse on one lavish good deed, instead of, say, giving all the people in their employ a $2-an-hour pay raise. But, no, that would merely promote the general welfare; movies...
...toward Sweeney yet heartless toward the human remains she pounded into patties. The wonderful singer-comedienne Judy Kaye, in last year's Broadway revival, saw Lovett as the flip side of Sweeney: they're both killers, but he's in it for retribution, she for the sick fun. Bonham Carter, though, is a figure of crafty scorn, and nearly as misanthropic as her demon lover. Ill fortune has ground him down; for her, it's the long slog of surviving among London's lower and criminal classes. The woman's dreamy side surfaces only in her number...