Despite its trailer hinting at an over-qualified cast selling something slight, 80 for Brady is a surprising (if scattered) romp with a beating heart. It has a deceptively simple conceit: respected actresses Jane Fonda, Sally Field, Rita Moreno, and Lily Tomlin play four aged best friends eager to travel to the 2017 Super Bowl to catch a glimpse of their favorite quarterback, Tom Brady; cue the age-inappropriate shenanigans.
Based somewhat on a true story (which is to say, a group of women in their 80s who gather to watch Brady play each weekend, but without the comedy of road trip errors), 80 for Brady is helmed by first-time feature director Kyle Marvin. His inexperience shows early on, when each joke settles into a rote rhythm as the movie cuts to close-ups for each punchline before immediately cutting back to wider group shots. The effect here is two-fold. First, the constant over-emphasis feels akin to an outdated laugh track, adding the exact same punctuation to every moment, whether or not it needs or deserves it. Second, it robs its leading quartet of the opportunity to sell each joke with their body language and interpersonal dynamics. More focus on the way they interact and play off each other’s energies might have helped things get off to a stronger start,t in a film about friendship, and one that opens with the four lead characters gathering for a 2017 playoff game involving Brady’s team at the time, the New England Patriots, and engaging in superstitions rituals with amusing fervor, while introducing themselves to the audience.
However, these missteps slowly begin to fall by the wayside once its four Bostonian ladies decide to watch the Super Bowl in Houston, no matter what it takes. The adventure yanks them far away from the close quarters of the domestic opening scene, so the movie has little choice but to let its legendary collective of actors dictate the comedic rhythms (it also helps that it was shot by two time Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll, whose eye for framing characters is on display here). Along the way, the group’s mis-adventures include (among other things) a hot wings contest, an impromptu dance, and a drug-induced trip through a fancy party – all scenarios which become doubly funny when you place older women at their center rather than the traditional frat boy.
These events are all glimpsed in the marketing, but what the trailers don’t fully reveal is how each scene (and the story in totality) works thanks to individual characterizations, and a script – by Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern – that ultimately centers around trusting and relying on your friends, and finding a second wind in old age. It’s fairly sweet, with a sentimentality born from each character having a rich, complex interiority that clashes wordlessly with their outward behavior.
These scenarios become doubly funny when you place older women at their center rather than the traditional frat boy.
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Sex-symbol Fonda plays Trish, a divorced woman with a string of romantic bad luck. She’s an author of NFL-centric erotic fan fiction, and she puts a ton of effort into still looking her seductive best, though her dedication to the group’s Super Bowl mission is occasionally tested once she’s distracted by a sexual pursuit. Granted, the digital makeover inexplicably applied to her face leaves her looking a little too smooth and unreal — a decision that’s especially strange in a movie explicitly about older women — but it’s a role that could have so easily been flattened into a one-note stereotype. Instead, Fonda imbues it with a touching tense of regret and frequent, silent questions of what living in the present even means when the past has offered up nothing but disappointment.
Field plays the flipside to that coin. Her character, retired probability professor Betty, is the youngest of the group (the frequent mentions of their fan club name, “80 for Brady,” are always accompanied by her reminders that she’s only 70) and she’s spent 50 years married to her husband, who is now dependent on her care. She’s seen as the responsible one in the bunch, which Field expertly portrays through both uptight neuroses and quiet acceptance. The group sees Betty as having a picture-perfect life, but perhaps more than the rest of them she’s in need of a new adventure to find parts of herself she left behind.
Moreno’s character, Maura, reflects another aspect of octogenarian life as it pertains to the group’s rejuvenation. She’s a respected and romantically sought-after member of her retirement community, which keeps its residents young through daily activities. But there’s also a sense that her jovial second wind is a way to stave off the grief of losing her husband the previous year. In a film that’s all about having fun in old age, that’s a pretty complicated approach to the subject, but one that Moreno embodies with grace and poise.
Brady is a producer on the film, so it’s no surprise that his greatness is treated as a given.
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And finally, there’s Tomlin’s Lou, the de facto protagonist, and a woman whose encroaching mortality is the entire impetus that kickstarts the old girls’ trip in the first place. However, Lou refuses to let her anxieties about death (and her ensuing denial about facing it) be known, lest they dampen the group’s spirits). The most comically excitable fan in the bunch, she discovered her love for football at a vulnerable time, and her decisions are now guided by words of advice offered by Brady in his many televised interviews. Brady is a producer on the film, so it’s no surprise that his greatness is treated as a given, and he’s often seen through Lou’s eyes (that said you could finish this story knowing as much or little about him, or about American football, as when you began). However, despite the often hilariously broad reverence for Brady, Tomlin approaches Lou’s questionable degree of hero worship with such affection that her performance essentially overpowers his constant background presence, all but reducing him from a sports star to a conceptual stand-in for any motivating reason to keep moving forward in old age.
Tomlin could probably sell the role if her new lease on life depended on eating a really special hot dog. In a just world, she’d join her three co-stars as an Academy Award winner for this movie. The rest of it may not be polished or prestigious enough to land on the Academy’s radar, but Tomlim commands the screen with verve, as a woman wrestling between her fears of death and her desire to have one last big bucket list adventure – which she sells with such a joyful, infectious radiance that she occasionally elevates 80 for Brady into an exuberant experience.
Granted, things often come easy for the women during their hunt for big game tickets — problems that seem dire always have sudden solutions, usually involving celebrity cameos — but where the plot has scant few twists and turns, its story of four women making up for lost time feels fulfilling enough.
