There’s an art to adapting an airport novel: It’s not necessarily about honoring the text, but rather capturing its briskness and narrative efficiency. Based on Thomas Perry’s 2017 novel of the same name and adapted by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine, FX’s The Old Man does just that by keeping things simple, if somewhat mysterious.
The story follows Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges), a widowed former C.I.A. operative who’s been living off the grid for decades and is flushed out of hiding when details about his past begin to emerge. With an arched walk, a slow drawl, and a perpetually uncertain look on his face, Dan cuts a fragile figure in the show’s melancholic pilot, directed by Jon Watts.
This is all a ploy, of course, to make Bridges’s hard-weathered protagonist more endearing and sympathetic to audiences. There’s a dolefulness to the show’s carefully drawn-out pacing and style that respects Dan’s inner turmoil, but it never loses sight of its potboiler bona fides. The Old Man is patient enough to let us know and ultimately understand Dan’s trauma, but it doesn’t make us wallow in the character’s withering misery either.
Incorporating that sense of mumbling zen that’s defined many of his performances throughout his career, Bridges is at once reserved and reflective here. Over the course of the show’s production, Bridges battled lymphoma and recovered, and shooting was delayed due to Covid-19, and the mournful nature of an elderly man reckoning with the trajectory of his life and the mistakes that he’s made are given extra gravitas by Bridges’s solemn performance. He naturally and movingly displays a sense of fear and uncertainty for what’s yet to come, along with a quiet dignity in fighting against the forces that want his character to lie idle.
In the first two of four episodes made available to critics, the series sustains a contemplative mood via long, unbroken takes that linger on Dan. That mood is also sustained throughout the action scenes, which aren’t stuffed with the CGI that’s the order of the day for blockbusters like Watt’s Spider-Man: No Way Home. Instead, the action is rooted in a sense of authenticity, which is especially important given the show’s fixation on people’s shaky morality.
Elsewhere, John Lithgow brings a similarly weary but more guarded edge to his role as Harold Harper, a high-ranking F.B.I. agent who shares a complicated past with Dan. Though never exactly chummy, Lithgow does let a gentleness peek through in his scenes with Bridges, allowing us to sense the history that’s hinted at between the two characters. Even when The Old Man’s writing doesn’t always live up to Bridges and Lithgow’s immense talents, the actors don’t have any trouble making the material feel believable and incredibly lived-in.
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