Lily Tomlin and Tom Brady in 80 For Brady.Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures
80 for Brady
Directed by Kyle Marvin
Written by Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins
Starring Sally Field, Jane Fonda and Tom Brady
Classification PG; 98 minutes
Opens in theatres Feb. 3
Toward the end of the screechy new comedy 80 for Brady, our octogenarian heroines finally meet their hero. (You can’t call it a spoiler if you can see it coming from the kickoff.) They are Lou (Lily Tomlin), a cancer survivor; Trish (Jane Fonda), a serial-dating sexpot; Maura (Rita Moreno), a grieving widow; and Betty (Sally Field), a retired mathematician and dutiful wife, who is not yet 80 but gets lumped in with the three who are. The year is 2017. Since 2001, the four friends have been superfans of the New England Patriots and their hubba-hubba quarterback, Tom Brady. For Lou especially, Brady is a human vision board: He appears regularly in her daydreams, where he reminds her to never give up.
Fortuitously, the quartet procure tickets to the Super Bowl. Predictably, they endure high jinks en route to and during the game. Miraculously, Brady drives one of the greatest comebacks in NFL history. Now the friends are in the postgame locker room, face to face with the man who means so much to them, and what they have to say to each other in this apex moment of their lives is … nothing. Pleasantries. Here’s the high point: Brady asks Lou to trade jerseys with him, but can’t find his jersey. “You can mail it to me,” Lou says, patting his knee. Then they sit and smile mildly into space.
The entire film plays out like this scene, an unformed vacuum held for too long hoping in vain for magic to appear. You can see how it happened. Someone heard this charming true story about four friends from Boston. Someone got the NFL onboard (their branding is rampant) and convinced Brady to sign on. Someone pulled together the dream cast, who could not be more game, and hired two of the three writers from Booksmart, Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins, who laboured womanfully to scrape together character arcs, crises and turning points.
Unfortunately, someone – I blame Kyle Marvin, a producer making his feature directorial debut – thought that all of that would surely jell into something fun, and forgot he had to make it into a movie, with scenes that have shape and momentum that builds to sequences that go somewhere.
Jane Fonda plays Trish, Sally Field plays Betty, Lily Tomlin plays Lou, and Rita Moreno plays Maura in 80 For Brady from Paramount Pictures.Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures
During the long 98-minute run time, I kept picturing how the demands of the shoot must have overtaken the actual filmmaking – where do we park the actresses’ enormous mobile homes, and who has her own hair and makeup artist, and how many takes can we ask Brady to do to thaw his rather frozen delivery, and how much time do we devote to schmoozing the visiting NFL reps, and oh, this scene isn’t working, but if we let the camera roam and we tell the actresses to improvise they’ll surely come up with something, and failing that we’ll just have them go, WHOOO! and HAHAHAHAHAHA in every scene, well, a few times in every scene because that’ll give us options for the trailer.
The condescending vibe and the whatever-ness of it all are disappointing given the collective calibre of the stars, revered, funny veterans who deserve better. But it’s grimly easy to imagine someone who is not an older woman saying, Eh, it’s good enough for the older-lady demographic, what with their reduced expectations of life.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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