‘THE Bucket List” is about vomiting blood, skull surgery, night chills, chemotherapy and catheters, and it begins and ends with people dying. In other words, it’s a feel-good movie.
Jack Nicholson plays a health-care firm CEO who finds himself a patient in one of his own hospitals. Thanks to his cost-cutting “two beds to a room, no exceptions” policy (and a forgivable script contrivance), he gets parked in the same room as a mechanic (Morgan Freeman) who wanted to be a history professor before life made other plans for him. The pair don’t hit it off.
“I’ve taken baths deeper than you,” humble Carter (Freeman) tells money-mad Edward (Nicholson).
Both men have only months to live, but while their cancers are in remission Edward gets a peek at the wish list of what Carter always wanted to do before he kicks the bucket – things like “witness something majestic.”
“Not to be judgmental, but this is extremely weak,” says Edward, delivering one of many classic Jack lines in Justin Zackham’s well-oiled script.
Edward, who doesn’t believe in God, has a few barbaric yawps he’d like to let loose before he takes a dirt nap, and since he’s got billions, he suggests expanding the bucket list,
James Bond-style.
Soon, they’re leaping out of airplanes, racing Mustang Shelbys (the holiday season’s product-placement superstar – it also features in the other big Warner Bros. holiday movie “I Am Legend”); seeing the Pyramids and going on safari. Carter, being happily married, declines the offer of an orgy, though Edward protests, “Orgy’s not even unfaithful. It’s just . . . professional.”
The script is so formulaic that the sound of the pages of the screenwriter’s manual being turned almost drowns out the mellow music of Freeman’s narration, and there’s a glossy, pat TV-ness about everything. Sean Hayes of “Will & Grace” is on hand as Edward’s assistant/punching bag, and Rob Morrow has been busted back to playing a doctor. The casting is not what you would call adventurous; after all these years, Freeman is still essentially driving Miss Daisy.
Yet this popcorn picture about death looks like director Rob Reiner’s first big hit since “A Few Good Men,” full of well-earned rueful humor (“Somewhere, some lucky guy is having a heart attack,” Edward says while getting the business from chemo). The banter is sharp, yet it sounds like real people talking, too.
Those who like their meaning-of-life flicks to be infested with vague/heavy symbolism and to be presented in black and white, or at least in Swedish, won’t like to hear this, but, commercial as it is, “The Bucket List” is slightly daring and more than a little bit wise.
Hollywood dislikes old people and loathes philosophy, but older viewers especially will find that this script touches important questions with wit and grace. Does Carter owe it to his family to die in a hospital bed so they can hover around him in a pity party, or does he owe even more to himself?
When Edward receives his diagnosis, he tells the doctor to move out of the way: He’s blocking his view. This is almost exactly what Diogenes told Alexander the Great after the emperor asked what he could do for the poor man, and though the meaning is slightly different, the eternal human struggle for answers is an unusually resonant chord for a big-budget studio movie to strike.
Carter and Edward’s discussion of religion hits all the essentials while being succinct and witty: “We live, we die, and the wheels of the bus go round and round,” says Edward. An element involving a family member that could easily have turned mawkish is instead handled with restraint that makes it more effective, while a big revelation near the end, which has to be hilarious, is.
Actors tell us that dying is easy, comedy is hard. But comedies about dying are hardest of all.