The Bucket List (2007) may be predictable, but it is not a terrible movie. It’s predictable because two guys with maybe a year to live predictably decide to do a list of things before they kick the bucket—and the list includes predictable items like driving fast cars and seeing exotic places.
Some big-name Hollywood talent is involved, with mixed results. Nice camera work: When the business tycoon, Edward (Jack Nicholson), receives his bad news, the camera slowly zooms in; when the erudite car mechanic, Carter (Morgan Freeman) receives his death sentence, the camera zooms in not identically, which would have seemed contrived, but a little less and a little quicker. Bad camera work: A shot of the two adventurers in Egypt where the pyramids look like a sound stage backdrop.
The dialogue is well-crafted but sometimes stereotypical. When Edward first suggests they try to do all the things on their bucket list, Carter says, “Sky diving, huh!?” Edward takes this to mean "Yes,” but Carter is actually undecided until his wife enters the hospital room and bosses him around. Cut to a plane over the desert. On the other hand, early on Carter complains about the hospital’s pea soup, and later when he again tells Edward, who owns the hospital, that the pea soup is still poor, Edward says he’ll have a word with the owner. Yuk, yuk. For two personalities who are meant to be unusual, such conversation is lame and stereotypical Hollywood fare.
Morgan Freeman is note perfect, never under- or over-playing. He makes Carter believable—a black garage mechanic with a history professor’s knowledge which he shares with such controlled enthusiasm that it’s never objectionable. You’d like to meet this guy. Jack Nicholson is typecast was the egocentric, hedonistic reprobate, but in the atypical scenes he acts well. For example, when he and Carter are luxuriating in Italy, he secretly takes a call from Carter’s distraught wife and then tries to convince Carter that they should end their junket. But you can tell his heart is not in the persuading—and so can Carter, who asks, “You talked to Virginia, didn’t you?”
In a predictable movie, I most appreciated the unpredictable touches. When Carter is racing his dream car, he purposely slams his Shelby into Edward’s Mustang. Yahoo! When a jump cut takes us to another stop on their journey—the Great Wall of China—the soundtrack irreverently blares “On the Road Again” by the old blues group Canned Heat. When their round-the-world adventure turns sour, it’s simultaneously a refreshing surprise and entirely in keeping with the characters.
I liked the idea of the list before you kick the bucket. And I appreciated Edward’s shallow approach to the list. If you spend all your time cogitating to create the perfect, profound list, you’ll be dead.
Yet if you read the Rotten Tomatoes website, you’ll find that The Bucket List is simply a rotten movie. Who says so and why? Well, Jeffrey Westhoff of the Northwest Herald in Crystal Lake, IL says the dialogue was not authentic and the movie did not make sense. Jeffrey, with a Batchelor’s from Marquette, was originally a copy editor for the newspaper. He is a critic like any other averaged into the Rotten Tomatoes rating. Are you ready to believe him? Are you ready to believe the rating?
I think it is better to turn to a tiny number of film critics you trust. So I turned to Roger Ebert, and he hated the movie. Yikes, I must have been wrong to think this one-star movie was okay! Well, let’s look at the argument advanced by the esteemed film critic. First, he writes that Morgan Freeman’s voice-over narration might have worked in The Shawshank Redemption and in Million Dollar Baby, but it does not work here because the Jack Nicholson character is unlikable and white. Whoa! The self-centered tycoon Edward is unlikable to nearly everybody but not to Carter. After 44 years of selfless service to his family, Carter gets a few months to do what he (!) wants to do thanks to the billionaire Edward, and Carter likes the guy! And white? This is Ebert’s personal baggage imposed on the film. A history of Ebert’s brilliant reviews reveals one issue where he sometimes goes off the rails: race. I was interested but not surprised to see his wife, black, at an Ebertfest. The esteemed critic goes on to say that Carter’s wife is not upset enough when he takes off on his around-the-world adventure. Well, she yells and screams and accuses him of abandoning his children, she phones Edward in Italy begging to not lose her husband before he dies, and when Carter arrives home he wisely does not use his key but rather knocks to see if she will admit him, which she does cautiously. How much more upset does she have to be? For a semi-estranged spouse she is plenty upset.
Then Ebert makes an uncharacteristic blunder not of analysis but of fact. He says twice that Edward “imposed” his hair-brained scheme on Carter, when, in fact, Edmond and Carter address this question directly, not indirectly, in the movie. Carter says that Edward may be powerful but not powerful enough to make him go on a junket he did not want to; then Edward explains about the distance between him and his bossy wife. Lastly, Ebert complains, as one who has battle cancer, that Edward and Carter would realistically have been too sick to travel around in the style they did. From my experience of a sibling dying from brain cancer—which both of these characters had—I’d say they were capable of the adventures but not of the bon vivant style in which they carried them out. So Hollywood took some medical liberties. Did the production team need to make Carter and Edward so perky, with nothing but a catheter problem to slow them down? While the lack of health problems made accompanying them on the journey more sprightly, it would have been more interesting if they had taken their medical problems with them, for it would have added a perplexity and a gravity to their adventures which were otherwise only implied.
Although I got a kick out of watching the movie, when I thought seriously about it, the fundamental weakness is the disjunction between a deep question and a shallow answer. The two men set out on a journey of pleasures and adventures only to learn in the end that family is the key to joy in life. But just as adventures were outside themselves and thus ultimately not the whole answer, so family is also outside themselves and, as many of us can attest, not to be depended on for life’s joy. After all, when Carter returned home, his wife could have slammed the door in his face. When Edward looked up his long lost daughter, she lived in a nice upper-middle class house and conveniently had a cute-as-a-button grand-daughter, but she could have been, say, a high-class prostitute selling cocaine on the side. From a movie with such a heavy question as how to live the last days of your life, you’d expect a more profound theme. The answer has more to do with looking inward and realizing what, for you, is the way.