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The veteran playwright Israel Horovitz, now 75, makes his feature-film directorial debut adapting his play "My Old Lady," a three-character drama that makes an ungainly leap from stage to screen.
Jim Gold (Kevin Kline) arrives in Paris to claim the apartment his estranged father left in his will, only to find it's occupied by a 92-year-old English woman, Mathilde (Maggie Smith) — a "viager," under a French real-estate law that requires Jim to let Mathilde live there and pay her 2,400 euros a month until her death.
Jim, an unsuccessful author and recovering alcoholic, scrambles to raise the money when Mathilde's daughter Chloe (Kristin Scott Thomas) threatens to void the viager contract. Jim also uncovers family secrets about his father and Mathilde, while also revealing details of his mother's long-ago suicide.
Kline overindulges his showier acting impulses, playing to the cheap seats when a subtler approach would serve him better. Horovitz also has trouble melding his play's satirical elements with the darker dramatic moments.
HH
'My Old Lady'
Opens Friday, Sept. 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; rated PG-13 for thematic material and some sexual references; 107 minutes.