Word: chelsea
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...been spared none of the vicissitudes of aging except poverty. He is a retired professor, and there is obviously good breeding and a bit of money in their backgrounds. But the isolation of old age is upon them. No close friends are left on the pond; their only child Chelsea has been estranged from her father since childhood and now almost never comes home. Divorced, childless, she is living the worrisome ad hoc life of the fortyish woman who is still trying to find herself. The promise of a visit from her before the summer ends does not cheer Norman...
...then, it seems, nothing could. He suffers from angina; he suffers from the thought of his approaching 80th birthday that is to be the occasion for Chelsea's return; he suffers from a constant preoccupation with death. "Don't you have anything else to think about?" his wife inquires. "Nothing quite as interesting," he answers. There is a bitterness as well as wit in that reply, as there is in most of Norman's sinkerball deliveries. But bitter or not, jokes are Norman's last line of defense, for if he is afraid of dying...
Soon Ethel is harder at work than usual as a go-between. Chelsea arrives with her new lover, Bill (well played by Dabney Coleman), a dentist whose laid-back manner does not hide a will hard as a platinum inlay. Then there is his 13-year-old son, Billy (Doug McKeon, who gets the bravado, vulnerability and candor of adolescence just right). He is toughing out a feeling that since Mom and Dad divorced he is essentially homeless, that the idea of dumping him with the old folks while Dad and Chelsea go to Europe is desertion...
Norman will still not concede his daughter is an adult ("Look at this fat little girl" is his greeting), and soon he is hectoring Bill about where he and Chelsea will sleep ("You could have the room where I first violated Ethel"). As for Billy, he is wary, always ready to sulk or run. But there are possibilities in the situation. It could break Norman's habit of turning ever more tightly in on himself, and teach Billy his conviction that no one is interested in him is wrong. If an old man starts to show a young...
...When Chelsea reappears, the old man even manages a tentative truce, acceptance of the sort Ethel has been struggling to bring about. Whether that truce signals a real reconciliation the movie does not definitively promise. But if it refuses to go for a big, emotional finish that would leave its audience awash in grateful tears, neither does it leave them without hope...