Rocket Gibraltar is the sort of slight, whimsical movie that only gets made if a big star decides he or she must make it. In this case, the star is Burt Lancaster, who certainly knows a choice role when he sees one.
Lancaster has grown old onscreen as gracefully as any actor ever has. Films such as Local Hero, Tough Guys and especially Atlantic City are celebrations of his magnificent professionalism. In Rocket Gibraltar, which is an otherwise negligible film, Lancaster has a role that explicitly examines an old man’s approach to his own death.
He plays a writer who gathers his family around him at his Long Island home for his 77th birthday. The family is played by a group of fine actors: Patricia Clarkson (Clint Eastwood’s leading lady in The Dead Zone), Frances Conroy, and Suzy Amis are his daughters, and the reliable John Glover (Masquerade) is his wheelerdealer son.
The sons-in-law include Bill Pullman, as a pitcher who’s lost his “voodoo curve ball,” and Kevin Spacey (currently in a recurring role in TV’s incredible Wiseguy) as a nervous standup comic.
Equally as important is the presence of a brood of grand children. One little boy in particular (Macaulay Culkin) seems to have an almost telepathic relationship with his grandfather. This boy discovers an old decrepit sailboat and decides to reconstruct it as a birthday present.
The movie dawdles along in On Golden Pond fashion, with the old man’s death an inevitability, especially once he tells the kids about his dream of a Viking funeral in which the corpse is set adrift on a boat and torched. At that point, you know it’s just a matter of time.
The film has one remarkable scene: Lancaster settles on his bed one aftenoon and, surrounded by a couple of birthday presents, quietly prepares to die. He puts Billie Holiday record on the stereo, pops a Fred Astaire movie in the VCR and opens a book of Jackson Pollock paintings – and experiencing these images of beauty, he passes away. For this brief sequence, the movie becomes oddly alive.
First published in the Herald, September 29, 1988
The film does have this strong cast, including a bunch of people near the beginnings of their careers – this was Clarkson’s third feature, and Spacey had done some stage and TV (including his bizarre Wiseguy performance). It was Culkin’s first feature, so there’s that footnote. The decent journeyman Daniel Petrie directed, and the film was written by Amos Poe, who directed the landmark punk documentary Blank Generation, so I have no idea how that fits into anything. I can still remember Lancaster’s pleasure at opening up the Jackson Pollock book – not in the death scene, but earlier, I think – and how well the actor conveyed the depth of aesthetic feeling.
WHAT A FEELING! 