An elderly man, sitting alone at a four-person table in his dining area, eats his dinner surrounded by silence, staring at nothing. This quick opening sequence is movie-shorthand for character exposition (the man is a widower--probably for a while now--in an obvious rut, still eating supper at the same time every night, in the same chair, just as he would if his wife were alive), and I feared the worst. Luckily, this script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, adapting Kent Haruf's novel, proves to be a solid job of writing. Robert Redford plays the widower who no sooner sits down with his newspaper before he gets a surprise visit from down-the-street neighbor and widow Jane Fonda, an acquaintance of his late wife's. She proposes an initially-puzzling proposition: since they are both alone--and lonely, she presumes--and she has a hard time sleeping anyway, why don't they spend their nights together, platonically, in the same bed? It takes Redford a day to consider it, and their first sleepover is awkward, but soon the strangeness wears off and the couple comes to cherish their not-so-secret, non-intimate evenings. Sensitive study of small town lives, old wounds, family problems, loss, greetings and farewells, is tenderly and astutely rendered. This handsomely-shot film for Netflix may be criticized for being too polite, too tasteful, but you come to want the best for these people, even in the midst of life's big and small messes. The dialogue is vivid--amazingly so--and the supporting cast is uniformly excellent. This is the finest effort from either Redford or Fonda in many years; together, they provide a lovely duet.
