'The Old Man': a dense 'thriller' that threatens to become a classic

“It is a very difficult case to understand.

When you think you understand it, it turns against you.”

Harold Harper (John Lithgow) tells Raymond Waters (EJ Bonilla) in the third episode of

, and it seems that he is talking about the series itself, which proposes a puzzle with ambiguous pieces full of trompe l'oeil.

When the viewer fits several and intuits one form, another appears that changes the image.

When you think you understand the series, it turns against you, and that only speaks well of this

(come on, let 's call it

for now, it's enough for us to place ourselves in the mess of genres) that fascinates, borders on perfection in some moments and, If it continues like this -Disney + doses us with the poison with the same stinginess with which the writers manage the information of the plot-, it could become the series of the year and a television classic.

The Old Man

It is the adaptation of the homonymous novel by Thomas Perry (which I have not read), by Robert Levine and Jonathan Steinberg, two black-footed screenwriters who work as a couple, like the Coens.

His style in this series could be defined as a humorless Coen.

The staging, the rhythm, the composition of the shots, the interpretation of the actors and that way of portraying the North American landscape convey the spirit of a

postmodern

To be true, however, it lacks irony and humor.

In fact, one of the things that fails in

is that it takes itself too seriously, emphasizing the solemnity in each scene, which ends up being a bit tiring.

Jeff Bridges, in the third chapter of 'The Old Man'.

Do not fear spoiling on my part, because it is almost impossible to tell the plot without making a mess.

The most basic synopsis is that Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges, and who would say: there are shots in which he looks like the John Huston of recent years) is a traitorous CIA agent who has spent half his life hiding under a false identity, and has to run away from his old bosses again for a revenge story.

He is chased by many people for reasons that become clearer and blurrier as the minutes go by, and he has to undertake a flight that sustains the plot.

Chase is annoyed, hearing voices and visions, and battling a madness more threatening than his pursuers.

On the other side, Harper, FBI boss and former colleague of his, is his antagonist, his intimate enemy, the one who wants to catch him and make him flee at the same time.

In police terms,

On these wickers, Levine and Steinberg assemble their puzzle of 10 million pieces where almost everything fits.

The escape story refers to the very origins of television, with

with the exception that Dan Chase is not an unjustly persecuted hero, but an ambiguous character whose demonic and Faustian character is underlined by the two big dogs of prey that They accompany and attack the jugular of the agents who try to arrest him (by the way, the interpretive level of the cast is so impressive, that even the dogs are excellent actors and provide the only —very slight— note of humor).

The

transfer the action to the Afghanistan of the Soviet war, which refers to the most classic adventure novel, to

The spies provide the necessary morbidity, equivocal and elusive, and there are no shortage of dark soap opera secrets, which the viewer knows and the characters do not: hidden daughters, horns, twisted love affairs, etc.

Jeff Bridges as Dan Chase in 'The Old Man', with the dogs that accompany him in the series.

But the dense and rich is not there, but in the implicit meditation on old age, loneliness and friendship.

Supported by a script that sometimes seems written and rewritten in marble —and which could use a little spontaneity, shorter speeches and less round phrases: no character clears his throat or leaves a sentence halfway, everyone speaks for posterity— , an amazing Jeff Bridges plunges us into the filth of decadence.

That growing old sucks may be an obvious thing that doesn't deserve so much rhetoric or production, but I've rarely seen it told with the poetry and depth with which Bridges drags his bruised body along the back roads of the United States.

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