Movie: On Golden Pond (Mark Rydell, 1981)
'Granddad jokes' are a different category from the well-established 'dad jokes'. They are nastier, more sophisticated and communicate different things about their maker. In On Golden Pond, Henry Fonda provides a good study of the phenomenon. Fonda plays Norman Thayer, a long retired professor suffering from heart palpitations, memory loss and a troubled relationship with his daughter Chelsea (Jane Fonda). Norman spends the majoirty of his time making jokes at the expense of himself and everyone around him. These jokes are most of the time not easy one-liners that flow naturally out of a conversation. Rather, he works for them, moving the conversation away into somewhat absurd contexts of his own making that allow him to be more cutting, darker, crueler, and indeed, funnier, than he otherwise would have been. These remarks/jokes serve obviously as a distraction from his, not unreasonable, fear that this may be his last summer in his beloved summer cottage by the lake, but Fonda also presents these jokes as proof of life, and as a contrast to his frailty. It's through them that he most succesfully can show to both his family and himself that he is more than just a dying man.
On Golden Pond is much less sentimental than I expected, based on both its outline/reputation and its opening scenes. After a seemingly neverending montage of tranquility at the lake side the first scenes between Fonda and Katherine Hepburn (playing his wife Ethel) fully reveal On Golden Pond's origins as a play. The early dialogue either outright states out the themes of the film or literalises too much the subtext of ordinary conversations between elderly couples. "Listen to me, mister. You're my knight in shining armour. Don't you forget it. You're gonna get back up on that horse and I'm gonna be right behind you holding on tight and away we're gonna go, go, go." has apparently come to be seen as one of the classic bits of dialogue in American cinema, but as every line has a similar overwrought energy, it loses some of its power. I am a fan of florid stlyised dialogue, but felt this is a bit too lofty in this context. It's not unentertaining however. I didn't grow up with Fonda and Hepburn, but they are legendary actors for a reason and always at least compelling to watch. In fact, the "knight in shining armor" line results from a great moment where Fonda turns from a hardened crank into a vulnerable sick man in a split second.
The film gets (a lot) better quickly when Chelsea and her new boyfriend Bill (Dabney Coleman) arrive together with his son from a previous marriage Billy (Doug McKeon). The dialogue becomes more natural once Fonda and Hepburn have more people to interact with and especially once Bill and Chelsea go to Europe leaving the kid with the grannies. Even though the scenes between Coleman and the Fonda's are the funniest in the film (he is a bit of an anxious klutz who tries to pretend he has it all together, while being completely overwhelmed by the family, including his girlfriend - you get the sense that Chelsea tried to find someone who is temperamentally and dispositionally as far removed from her dad as possible), the heart of the film is the growing relationship between Billy and Norman. Even though the film is an unabashed celebration of Hepburn and Fonda (and made for their generation), it never adopts a 'kids these days' attitude in part because it sess Norman and Billy as kindred spirits whose unfiltered language serves as a way of making sense of their place in the world.
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