Talking points

• In The Old Man, Jeff Bridges plays a former CIA operative whose past comes back to haunt him.
• Bridges is 72, but his character Dan Chase frequently does battle in the show with agents half his age.  
• Production was shut down twice in 2020 – first in March by COVID, then in October when Bridges was diagnosed with lymphoma. 
• With Bridges in remission, shooting resumed in February this year. A second season was announced on June 27.

The Old Man, Disney+
★★★★½

When we first see Jeff Bridges in The Old Man he is just that – an old man, his sleep disturbed by a weak bladder, aching bones and the needs of a dementia-stricken wife. By the end of the first episode, the picture is more complex. He’s a tough, wily old bastard willing to do anything to survive.

Bridges is the aptly named Dan Chase, and after 30 years of living in peaceful obscurity, he’s suddenly on the run. It’s soon apparent that’s not his real name, nor his only one.

Jeff Bridges as Dan Chase, a former CIA operative whose 30-odd years of peaceful obscurity comes to an abrupt and brutal end in The Old Man.Credit:Prashant Gupta/FX

As a young CIA operative in Afghanistan, played by Bill Heck, he’s called Jon. In the present day, where he’s trying to evade payback for whatever happened back then, he has a stash of cash and a swag of false identities, as well as a range of places to hole up.

Based on the four episodes (of seven) made available for preview, The Old Man is a brilliantly written, acted and directed thriller that keeps our sympathies shifting throughout. It’s also a whip-smart tale about an old codger who rages against the dying of the light and is willing to put a bullet through anyone who tries to snuff it out early.

The genius of the show is that while we want Chase to make it, we’re never entirely sure we should want that. He is capable of terrible things, and when his path crosses that of Zoe (Amy Brenneman), whose only mistake is to allow him to rent a cabin from her, the old man begins to look more threat than threatened. Her presence complicates his flight and introduces a rich moral dimension to the propulsive action dynamic.

There are echoes of the recent thriller Pieces of Her in all this. There Toni Collette played a woman whose quiet life is disrupted when scores from her past demand to be settled. The question of identity – of the stories people tell about and to themselves, and the collateral damage those fabrications have on the people around them – is central to both.

The Old Man, though, is a superior project. The casting is superb: Heck looks convincingly like a younger Bridges, while Hiam Abbas and Leem Lubany as his older and younger wife and John Lithgow/Christopher Redman as the older/younger boss Harold Harper could serve as proof that time travel is possible. The Afghan village sets (actually built in the US) and the superbly moody score by T Bone Burnett and Patrick Warren ratchet up the tension and believability no end.

The one point at which The Old Man really stretches credibility is the amount of punishment Chase is subjected to. Bridges is 72, and seeing him shuffle off for a pee every couple of hours is way more believable than watching him wrestle and defeat an agent half his age.

Bill Heck as the young Dan Chase.Credit:Raymond Liu/FX

He emerges from these encounters bruised and scraped and with an even more pronounced shuffle, but emerging itself ought to be beyond him.

Still, Bridges is such a compelling actor, and Chase such an intriguing character, that you’ll likely join me in suspending your disbelief and willing him on to fight another day.

Email the author at [email protected], or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin

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