Strangers in the Park (now on Netflix) is an Argentinian adaptation of Herb Gardner’s Tony-winning play I’m Not Rappaport, about two old men sitting on a park bench, bickering and bantering about this, that and the other – and occasionally getting into comically dangerous (dangerously comic?) scrapes. As Gardner directed a film version of the play in 1996, Argentine director Juan Jose Campanella (2009’s Oscar-winning The Secret in Their Eyes) staged a version of the play prior to helming this film version, starring two wily veteran actors in Luis Brandoni and Eduardo Blanco, and featuring a little backhanded dig at a certain streaming giant that I assume wasn’t in the original script.
The Gist: An opening script tells us this could take place in 2030 or 1984 or 506 or 2000, “or who knows.” An old feller sits on a bench, his shaky hands holding up a newspaper he can barely see. That’s Antonio Cardozo (Blanco). Disrupting his peace is a second old feller meandering toward the bench, pontificating on how pleasurable it is to eliminate waste from his body. That’s – well, he fills the airspace with so much verbal fabrication you can’t trust a damn thing he says. He’s a spy on a mission, he’s a high-powered lawyer, he’s an “86-year-old Pollack” named Samuel Goldfarb (Brandoni). The latter seems plausible enough so we’ll call him Samuel, but don’t be surprised if we eventually learn that’s bull roar.
These guys don’t know each other that well. They only met the week prior. Antonio isn’t particularly thrilled with it, since Samuel – IF that is his real name – talks and talks and talks and talks miles and miles and miles and miles of hornswoggle, disrupting his inability to read the paper. He was a communist activist, he was dead for six minutes once, he has a secret identity, he laments the one lover that got away, on and on he goes. When Antonio stops griping about Samuel’s tickertaping fibbery, he brags about his grandchildren and shares how he lost his peripheral vision, and now feels like he’s looking through a straw. Samuel is the type of person who responds to the latter point by saying, “Why do we need sight when we have vision?”
We spend a few days-turning-into-evening with these guys. Sometimes, they turn to sing to an attractive young woman named Laurita (Manuela Menendez), who comes to the park to fill her sketchpad. They quarrel with a mugger who isn’t above shoving an old man to the pavement. Antonio works as a superintendent in a building and runs into the guy who wants to gently relieve him of his employment – warning, ageist landmines ahead – so Samuel steps in, pretending to be an attorney, and threatens to sue if they fire Antonio. “Samuel”’s daughter Clarita (Veronica Pelaccini) shows up to express her concern for her aging father, who lives on his own and wanders to the park and spews so many confabulations she wonders if he even knows who he really is anymore. He and Clarita argue about how and what has changed over the years, how he was a leftist activist who named her after a leftist activist. She insists he’s “fighting old wars” but he pushes back, calling her “the queen of condos” and raising kids who are too happy to be sitting around watching Netflix. Ouch!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Did Grumpy Old Men spin off from this? Anyway. The O.G. movie I’m Not Rappaport stars Ossie Davis and Walter Matthau, and is available to rent on Amazon Prime Video and Fandango and all those places. Roger Ebert said it incorporated too much plot and should’ve been “two old guys, sitting on a bench, talking for two hours.” Two-and-a-half stars.
Performance Worth Watching: Brandoni brings authenticity to his character, in sharp contrast to Blanco, whose exaggerated mannerisms – e.g., a voice so raspy you hear multiple octaves when he speaks – feel like a half-step beyond capital-A Acting.
Our Take: I’m tempted to pigeonhole “Samuel” as the liberal atheist and Antonio as the conservative believer, but I’m trying not to be poisoned with political brian rot these days. More broadly and accurately, the former is a risk-taker holding so tightly to his principles, he alienates those around him. And the latter is content to be bored, going through the motions of life – you know, holding up a newspaper even though he can barely see it – but willing to compromise. In some interpretations, “Samuel” could be obnoxious and Antonio could be cowardly, and we see both men show those traits on more than one occasion. Put them together, and you’d have one yin-meets-yang fully rounded human being, which isn’t to say they fail to be fleshed-out movie characters. So few real human beings can carry both yin and yang, can they?
So what I’m saying is, “Samuel” and Antonio are representative archetypes that Campanella plays with, albeit with a few odd little personality flourishes to make sure they don’t wholly adhere to cliched worldviews. There’s amusement and bits of wisdom to be gleaned from their interactions, which play out over the course of a single-location mostly two-hander dramedy. They acknowledge what’s left of their libidos, share their regrets, squabble (Antonio even puts up his dukes at one point) and call each other names (“I’ve never met a bigger son of a bitch in the history of sons and bitches!”).
They also get on our nerves, via “Samuel”’s endless oxygen-massacring prattle and Blanco’s overwrought performance. Campanella has no qualms with indulging a syrupy musical score that flavors the endeavor with a thin layer of saccharine bathos, but it’s not a dealbreaker. You’ll settle into the rhythms of these two old farts’ back-and-forth and yearn for them to become better friends in spite of themselves. As it turns out, “Samuel”’s thirst for adventure gets Antonio into some trouble, but is it better to live a life where you avoid risk, or end up with some stories to tell? I’m sure there’s a happy medium in there somewhere.
Our Call: Strangers in the Park is a pleasant, diverting entertainment underscored with some welcome philosophical musings. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
