Sunday, August 6, 2017

The Last of Robin Hood (2013)

Movie about the final romance in the life of notorious ladies man Errol Flynn, its was not so much May/December as March/December given that Flynn (Kevin Kline) was 48 when it started and his paramour Beverly Aadland (Dakota Fanning) only 15. We can give Flynn a little slack given that he probably didn't know Beverly's real age when the affair started, she had apparently been lying about it to get chorus line work at the studios, but he no doubt found out the truth rather quickly. Errol persisted in the affair anyway, enabled by Beverly's star struck mother Florence (Susan Sarandon) the couple carried on for two years, Flynn even making what looks like a truly awful pro-Castro movie with her called Cuban Rebel Girls, and then basically died in her arms on a trip to Canada. Flynn took such bad care of himself that his cause of death is literally two lines long on Wikipedia.

The story here is really pretty interesting and spilled into a big public scandle after Flynn's death. All three lead performances here are strong, especially Kline's which is deceptively good, he so naturally seems to inhabit Flynn that he hardly appears to be acting. The problem is the story doesn't seem to lend itself particularly well to a theatrical feature film, the substance is rather lite for the caliber of  the performers in it, the whole thing would have been best suited as a 1970's movie of the week.

The most interesting things about this story happen after the movie ends its narrative, Beverly had a rough decade or so including two failed marriages and a boyfriend killed in struggle over a gun in her apartment, but then she seemed to pull herself together and had a four decade plus long marriage before dying of diabetes and heart failure in 2010. Now a movie about that would probably have been time better spent. **

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