"The Old Man" Starts Strong, then Stumbles . . . but the Young Women More Than Hold Their Own

 (If you’re spoiler-wary, be forewarned.)

No, I’m not talking about Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Lynn Cheney. The Old Man is a streaming series that premiered on Hulu in June 2022, with a second season in the works. It stars Jeff Bridges, whose playing the lead added an extra dimension to the show.

Bridges had shot the first 5 episodes of the series when in 2020, during the pandemic, the then 70-year-old Oscar-winner was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and underwent chemotherapy. This was doing wonders when, pre vaccines, he contracted COVID. After five months’ treatment for the deadly virus, he managed to struggle through the final two episodes of The Old Man, which had been shortened to 7 episodes from the originally planned 10. While in the hospital with COVID, Bridges told People reporter Mia McNiece: “The doctors kept telling me, ‘Jeff, you’ve got to fight. You’re not fighting.’ I was in surrender mode. I was ready to go. I was dancing with my mortality.”

And his character, Dan Chase, does much the same in The Old Man. 

Chase’s old age is emphasized from the start. He struggles to get out of bed and to put his socks on. He shuffles to the bathroom multiple times a night and has difficulty peeing. His main concern, however, is his mental state. His late wife, Abbey (played as an older woman by Hiam Abbass), suffered from a form of dementia and he fears he might be going down the rabbit hole as well. His eying café customers suspiciously and suddenly jury-rigging a burglar alarm out of tin cans and a string do seem to point to paranoia. But his daughter, Emily (Alia Shawkat), and the doctor he sees about possible cognitive impairment, reassure him that “everything’s fine . . . nothing out of the ordinary.” 

Not having read Thomas Perry’s like-named 2017 novel on which the series is based, I trusted that the show’s creators, Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine, given Bridges’ recent health issues, also planned nothing too out of the ordinary for his septuagenarian character. So I was quite content to sit back and enjoy a well-made character study of an aging widower with a doting daughter and two trusty Doberman Pinschers and leave it at that.

But then . . . the same night Chase installed his makeshift alarm, it jars him awake. And when he creeps downstairs with a gun, spots an intruder, whom the Dobermans would’ve killed had Chase not called them off. And when he asks the intruder his name and receiving no reply, shoots him point blank. And finally when he places the man’s hands around his own gun and fires two shots at the wall—naïve and seasoned viewers alike realize we’ve been royally had.

The police called to the scene also smell a rat when they discover a silencer on the intruder’s gun. And when Chase tells them he’s going to stay with family in a nearby town for a while but instead calls Emily and tells her, “They found me . . . I can’t go back,” we grasp that Chase’s name was telling us more than we knew. 

“Monster hook,” in other words, as the schlocky producer calls the opening to the film he’s pitching in Robert Altman’s The Player (1993). In The Old Man’s case, however, the hook is too monstrous for its own good, an act that’s just too tough to follow—in more ways than one.

We still have an old man as our protagonist, but the gerontology aspect has been blown away by a spy vs. spy thriller that’s a Category 5 brain-twister, mixed metaphors intended. Trying to get a handle on the tortuous machinations brought to mind Howard Hawks’ classic 1946 film noir The Big Sleep, whose storyline was so confusing that the filmmakers finally asked Raymond Chandler, who’d written the source material, to explain it—and he couldn’t either! The Old Man’s cloak-and-dagger shenanigans, which I only managed to reconstruct with the aid of Amav Srivastava’s Review Geek blog, go something like this.

It’s now 2017, somewhere on the East coast, and Dan Chase is one of a string of pseudonyms he took on after a rogue stint with the CIA during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s. Afghanistan was a wise substitution for the novel’s Libya, given that US involvement in that North African country is a foggy memory at best for most Americans; whereas Afghanistan, given our tragic, just-ended war there, and Russia’s having reverted to Stalinism under Putin, are front and center.

Unfortunately, the multiple flashbacks to Chase’s Afghan period don’t benefit from showing rather than telling, because the showing is cinematically the weakest in the series and these lengthy interspersed scenes bog down a story whose emotional and narrative core lies in the present.

While in Afghanistan, Chase, then a young Johnny Kohler (Bill Heck), went into hiding after falling for and fleeing to the US with a young Abbey (Leem Lubany), the Afghan wife of Faraz Hamzad (Pej Vahdat), leader of a marginal insurgent group fighting alongside the Mujahideen (from which Osama Bin Laden would later emerge). The fugitive couple finally settled down and raised Emily—to a point, after which she joined the family of another “old man,” Harold Harper (Jon Lithgow), Chase’s CIA station chief in Afghanistan and current FBI Director of Counterintelligence.

After Abbey’s death and decades after their settling down, Chase is suddenly on the run again, and his chasers have expanded. They still include the CIA, working on behalf of the cuckholded Hamzad (after thirty years?). But now Harper has Chase in the crosshairs as well. Not knowing that Emily— having changed her name to Angela Adams—is Chase’s daughter, and that she became his assistant at the FBI to help both her “fathers,” Harper has hired a hit man to make sure that Chase’s and his own dubious dealings in Afghanistan remain hush-hush.  

Then there’s Morgan Bote (Joel Grey), Chase and Harper’s CIA boss in Afghanistan, who’s in cahoots with Hamzad and also wants Chase’s story kept under wraps. A shadowy figure who pops up only intermittently, Bote appears to be the grandpa puppeteer and the key to explaining The Old Man’s uber-convoluted plot.

Though the full extent of Bote’s overarching role will have to wait for Season 2, he further complicates matters here by calling Chase and Harper his two “sons,” echoing Emily/Angela’s two “fathers.” And Harper reinforces the notion. At a pivotal moment late in the series, when Chase asks Harper who’s behind their latest caper, Harper answers, “the Old Man”—referring most obviously to their former boss but metaphorically to “old man” as a synonym for “father,” which of course applies to Chase and Harper, via Emily/Angela, as well.

So now we have three “old men” to cope with, and even a fourth and fifth if we add to the list the aging Hamzad (Navid Negahban) and former Russian soldier turned businessman Suleyman Pavlovitch (Andrew Perez/Rade Serbedzija). Pavlovich’s role in the international intrigue is a Category Four all by itself, and as if our heads weren’t already spinning, here goes.

Captured by Hamzad during the war and a potential source of valuable intelligence, Pavlovich managed to escape through Chase and Abbey’s intercession, thus another reason for their own flight and for Hamzad’s seething resentment. Abbey had feared, first, that Pavlovich, under torture, would reveal her having been embedded with the Russians, but only to help the Afghans. Mainly she dreaded Pavlovich’s divulging that a remote Afghan region contained a treasure trove of rare earth minerals, which could turn the tide of the war and transform Afghanistan but also would likely corrupt Hamzad in the process. Pavlovich, once freed, went on to become a successful financier, and Chase, via his own post-war incarnation as a venture capitalist in Los Angeles (you heard right), hopes to use Pavlovich to get at Hamzad.

I’ve left out all the fisticuffs and shoot ’em ups, which of course go with the territory, and at which both young and old man Chase more than hold their own. Indeed, as with Perry’s novel, which was applauded for its anti-ageist portrayals, The Old Man series deserves credit for giving the elderly their due. But for me, it’s not as an ode to old men that the show deserves the most praise. It’s as a showcase for strong, independent women that the streamer truly shines, and largely compensates for a male-driven narrative that begins like a locomotive but threatens to plunge down a ravine from its overloaded freight.

All four of the main women in the film are imposing figures: whip smart, attractive, and in Abbey’s and Emily/Angela’s cases, not anybody to mess with. Besides Abbey’s daredevil double-agenting in the war, in one scene she slits Russian soldiers’ throats as expertly as Johnny Kohler. Emily/Angela earns her stripes not only as a brilliant FBI researcher who once cold-cocked an officer at the Naval Academy for calling her “Freckles,” but also as an ultra-loyal daughter who’s faithful to a point to her adoptive father Harper but whose top priority is protecting (seemingly) biological papa Chase by any means necessary.

Then there’s Zoe (Amy Brenneman), a divorced mother with a college-age son, whom Chase meets, and has sex with, while on the run from the intruder incident. Not knowing the whole story (join the club), she chooses to join him on his latest flight, but then is taken hostage and stuffed in the trunk of his car when things heat up and he can’t afford to let her go. In Los Angeles, he forces her to masquerade as his wife, but in one of the series’ superb reversals, she turns the tables on him with an air-tight scheme to take half his money. Though he’s utterly flummoxed at first, her bravado ultimately earns his respect and draws them closer.

The fourth superwoman is Nina Kruger (Rowena King), Hamzad’s spokesperson, who actually governs the last portion of the narrative by getting all the principals to travel to Morocco where the series’ inconclusive climax unfolds. Nina is a sinister and seemingly impenetrable force at the outset, but Zoe, having learned from Chase to read people for possible chinks in their armor, believes she’s sensed a subtle shift in Nina—yet another narrative strand that Season 1 of The Old Man leaves hanging but Season 2 is sure to revisit.

A non-Maoist Gang of Four, one might call these uncommonly capable females, or a more hopeful Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse. If they continue to strut their stuff in Season 2, the Old Man and his minions may have a run for their money.