At Last. Kate and Hank! Hepburn and Fonda in On Golden Pond

On Golden Pond burnishes age with the art of Hepburn and Fonda

It begins with images of serenity: wild flowers gently stirring in an almost imperceptible spring breeze; loons, bright-eyed and sleek, afloat on untroubled waters; the lake itself shimmering in the backlight of a dying sun. The first glimpses of Golden Pond are washed with the kind of burnished light that colors our recollections of better places and better times past.

The first glimpses of the aged couple who are reopening their comfortable old summer house are suffused with a similar light, though that is more a trick of the moviegoer’s memory than of the cinematographer’s art. For Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda arrive in On Golden Pond bearing with them not merely their vacation baggage but a montage of beloved images assembled from a combined 95 years of motion picture acting in 129 features, not to mention uncounted stage and television appearances.

Spunky Kate and Honest Hank! If people were allowed to vote on such matters, the pair would probably be grandparents to an entire nation, since they are among the very few movie stars who have gone on working while four or five movie generations have grown up. By this time, their personal crotchets and graces, the events in the chronicle of their lives, have merged in the public mind with fragments from all those movies. Down the long corridor of the years, it seems we have encountered them at every turning. When they were young they gave lessons in romance; in middle age they taught steadfastness and honor; now it seems not only right but almost inevitable that they should come together—astonishingly—for the first time, to share some of the pains and puzzlements of age with us.

It comes as a gift that the vehicle is literately written by Ernest Thompson and sensitively directed by Mark Rydell. On Golden Pond is a mature movie, and for the first time in years that does not make it an oddity. The youth audience the film industry has been wooing for more than a decade is growing up. According to an industry source, 43% of those Americans who regularly go to movies are now over 29 (only 25% were in that age group eight years ago). Very few major movies aimed at adolescents are being released this holiday season. Instead, the next weeks will offer Ragtime, an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s panoramic vision of turn-of-the-century America; Reds, Warren Beatty’s life of Revolutionary John Reed; Absence of Malice, a serious examination of journalistic ethics; and Whose Life Is It Anyway?, which is about euthanasia. Even the new John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd feature is far from Animal House; it is an adaptation of Thomas Berger’s Neighbors, a farcically structured but coruscating novel about friendship. As if to stress the point, such legendary figures as James Cagney and Fred Astaire (see boxes) will be back on-screen before the year turns.

In any season, On Golden Pond would be welcome. Like last year’s Ordinary People, the film addresses itself seriously and intelligently, without sermon or sociology, to an inescapable human issue: in this case, finding a decent ending for a life. By inviting audiences to contemplate the struggle of two attractively idiosyncratic old parties coming to terms with mortality, On Golden Pond gently requires them to confront that same inevitability in themselves. In short, those serene images of the film’s opening are deceptive; age is not entirely golden on Golden Pond; dark currents flow just beneath its surface.

As the lives of Norman Thayer Jr. and his wife Ethel unfold, it becomes apparent that they have been spared none of the vicissitudes of aging except poverty. He is a retired professor, and there is obviously good breeding and a bit of money in their backgrounds. But the isolation of old age is upon them. No close friends are left on the pond; their only child Chelsea has been estranged from her father since childhood and now almost never comes home. Divorced, childless, she is living the worrisome ad hoc life of the fortyish woman who is still trying to find herself. The promise of a visit from her before the summer ends does not cheer Norman.

But then, it seems, nothing could. He suffers from angina; he suffers from the thought of his approaching 80th birthday that is to be the occasion for Chelsea’s return; he suffers from a constant preoccupation with death. “Don’t you have anything else to think about?” his wife inquires. “Nothing quite as interesting,” he answers. There is a bitterness as well as wit in that reply, as there is in most of Norman’s sinkerball deliveries. But bitter or not, jokes are Norman’s last line of defense, for if he is afraid of dying, he also dreads living mentally and physically diminished. He can’t remember things—the faces in an old photograph near the phone or, for that matter, why he picked up the phone in the first place. He can no longer do simple chores—can’t repair the screen door, can’t start a fire in the fireplace without imperiling the house. One day Ethel, seeking to get him stirring, sends him out to pick berries. He becomes confused, can’t recall the turns in the road and stumbles home in shame. In one of the film’s most moving moments, he confesses to Ethel why he returned so quickly: “I was scared to death—that’s why I came running back. To see your pretty face, to feel safe.”

In his wife’s deliberately overstated response—she insists he is still her “knight in shining armor”—there is irony.

For as Norman’s apologist and mediator between him and his daughter, him and the world, she has become the defender of his faltering faith in himself and the emotional stability of their narrowing world.

Soon Ethel is harder at work than usual as a go-between. Chelsea arrives with her new lover, Bill (well played by Dabney Coleman), a dentist whose laid-back manner does not hide a will hard as a platinum inlay. Then there is his 13-year-old son, Billy (Doug McKeon, who gets the bravado, vulnerability and candor of adolescence just right). He is toughing out a feeling that since Mom and Dad divorced he is essentially homeless, that the idea of dumping him with the old folks while Dad and Chelsea go to Europe is desertion.

Things do not begin promisingly.

Norman will still not concede his daughter is an adult (“Look at this fat little girl” is his greeting), and soon he is hectoring Bill about where he and Chelsea will sleep (“You could have the room where I first violated Ethel”). As for Billy, he is wary, always ready to sulk or run. But there are possibilities in the situation. It could break Norman’s habit of turning ever more tightly in on himself, and teach Billy his conviction that no one is interested in him is wrong. If an old man starts to show a young man the ropes (or at least how to handle a fishing line), perhaps Norman will see he still has useful work to perform as a teacher. Perhaps Billy will see that even if affection is crankily stated, it is still affection, and that he is worthy of it.

The psychology may be taken a little too straight out of Erik Erikson, or even Gail Sheehy, and the plot verges on the melodramatic (it takes a boating accident to seal the bargain of friendship between the generations). But emotionally On Golden Pond is no less valid for being something of a cliche. Anyway, the characters are so strong that the piece does not play as a cliché. Hepburn, for example may have a less chewy part than has Fonda, but the briskness of her manner, her well-justified image as a no-nonsense individualist who is nevertheless a good sport, serve her wonderfully. There is a vivifying touch of tension between an actress who was a liberated woman before the movement was born and her role as traditional wife and mother.

But Golden Pond finally belongs to Henry Fonda, who has had to wait until the end of his life for the part of his life. As Norman he is able to bring together, in a single character, the two main strands of his talent. The old gentleman’s character is grounded on the main line of Fonda’s star career. The fundamental decency and intelligence that were basic to the likes of Tom load and Mr. Roberts still infuse his presence.

Indeed, so powerful has that image been that one sometimes forgets how splendid he has been as a character actor. The military martinet of Fort Apache, the cold-eyed outlaw of Once Upon a Time in the West, even the hilariously befuddled herpetologist “Hopsy” Pike of The Lady Eve—they all light up in one’s memory as the spirit that animated them flashes in Fonda’s eyes. Without raising his voice he gives a bravura performance as he moves from depressed withdrawal to momentary rages, from the struggle to express affection to the struggle not to express it, lest it be mistaken for weakness.

When Chelsea reappears, the old man even manages a tentative truce, acceptance of the sort Ethel has been struggling to bring about. Whether that truce signals a real reconciliation the movie does not definitively promise. But if it refuses to go for a big, emotional finish that would leave its audience awash in grateful tears, neither does it leave them without hope.

With all their visitors departed, the last bags and boxes stowed in the station wagon, Norman and Ethel go down to the pond to say goodbye to the loons that have been their summer companions. The bird family turns out to be diminished too—just the mother and father are left. Fonda eyes them and in the wry, dry voice that has drawled through our consciousness for almost half a century, speaks a kind of generational epitaph, weary but accepting. “Babies are all grown up . . . and moved to Los Angeles or somewhere.”

The spirit in which he speaks—realistic, humorous, but with feeling—is precisely what claims one’s respect for On Golden Pond. When it sometimes seems the whole society has spiritually decamped for Tinseltown, the movie offers the hope that people can come home again—at least for a visit.

—By Richard Schickel