Morgan Freeman is the ailing but always noble companion to a cranky old white guy whose deeply repressed life gets a jump start from a plucky young female protégée.
No, it's not Million Dollar Baby — not by a long shot.
Freeman turns out to be just about the only thing worth watching in Lasse Hallström's long-stalled project An Unfinished Life, a tepid melodrama where pretty much everything that's going to happen is known within the first 10 minutes. Precocious young daughter in tow, battered woman Jennifer Lopez travels to Wyoming and moves in with estranged father-in-law Robert Redford, who still blames Lopez for the death of his son, her husband, many years ago. It's only a matter of time before bonding happens between all of the feuding parties here, and the movie plods along on autopilot, occasionally injecting its cliché-ridden story with bits of overplayed symbolism (including much ado about a bear who just wants to be free, and one character who keeps dreaming of the sea).
Despite sitting around unreleased for two years, An Unfinished Life feels, well, unfinished — technically polished but narratively sloppy and rushed, with half-hearted performances (Redford delivers one of his blandest turns ever), and moments where it seems like scenes have been arbitrarily excised (at one point, two characters declare their undying love for one another with no build-up whatsoever). The characters here are all types rather than flesh and blood — Freeman's long-suffering human angel, Lopez's poster girl for domestic violence, Redford's man-who's-lost-everything-except-his-anger-at-the-world — and it's hard to care much about any of them. Also stars Becca Gardener and Josh Lucas.
An Unfinished Life (PG-13) opens Sept. 9 at local theaters. HH
Lance Goldenberg
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2005.