Review of Make Way for Tomorrow

I first heard of this film when reading Jonathan Rosenbaum's short take on Sarah Polley's "Away from Her"; that film was my favorite of this year (2007) so far, and Rosenbaum saying that it was "within hailing distance" of this Leo McCarey film meant I had to track this down. I'm glad I did; though the 5 Minutes to Live DVD was of fairly low quality, the essential genius of the film shows through: this is, as Rosenbaum and a few other perceptive critics have noted, one of the greatest films ever made about aging and the conflicts between the desires of children leading their own lives, and their responsibilities towards their own parents. Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore are the parents of five grown children, including Thomas Mitchell as the eldest, who have lost their home; the children grudgingly offer to take them in, but none is willing to take both parents. One of the amazingly simple points that the film makes in a beautifully understated manner is that the kids simply don't understand, or care about the importance of the parents' relationship with each other; they can only focus on the parent-child situation. All the performances are fine, but Bondi's is one for the ages; the scene where she receives a call from her husband, the mingled sorrow and joy in her voice as time stops around her, disrupting the bridge class that her daughter-in-law is conducting, is heartbreaking. The last 15 minutes or so, the couple reuniting for one last time, could so easily be schmaltzy or maudlin, but McCarey doesn't create heroes or villains, he doesn't offer easy outs or artificial obstacles, he just lets them be old people, disappointed and lost...