In a peculiar small-town café in the hinterland of the United States, septuagenarian Louis Waters is surrounded by elderly men offering generous amounts of smirks and judgmental looks. “I admire your strength,” nudges one of his geriatric friends, hinting at Louis’ speculated sexual relation with his 70-year-old neighbour Addie Waters. The gossip – which has by now swept the fictional town of Holt – started when Addie knocked on Louis’ door at twilight with an innocently courageous proposal: she wanted to sleep with him. Just that – hold his hand and sleep with him.
Louis and Addie in Kent Haruf’s final novel, Our Souls at Night, are an addition to characters the author is known to create – those fighting parochialism with dignity in small-town America. Both are widowed and dare to expect more at an age when you are unable to overlook the baggage of personal history, lifetime of inadequacies, challenges of senility and the looming shadow of death and loneliness. But Louis and Addie, who have lived a life fearing society’s perceptions, transcend these fears to seek liberty and companionship. It’s interesting to note that Our Souls at Night was Haruf’s posthumous novel, presumably written in his last days, perhaps in pursuit of the same happiness, but achieved through creative fulfillment. Standing at the edge of his life, Haruf in a mellow, observational tone gives us an account of what truly matters after all is said and done.
Haruf’s novel is an ordinary work of prose with extraordinary depth. Ritesh Batra’s adaptation of the book therefore is a deceptively easy one, owing to a lack of complex narratives and structuring. To such an extent that the novel opens with a charmingly ordinary line: “And then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters”. From thereon the story moves chronologically, and is written in a manner that’s both literary and cinematic. Haruf’s third person narrative only adds to the ease. But to Batra’s credit, despite an adaptable prose at his disposal, he refrains from making Our Souls at Night a conventional weepy, packed with unwarranted drama. He instead lends the film a quiet dignity, and lets moments of silence emerge, which is integral to a story about two old people.
At the centre of Louis (Robert Redford) and Addie’s (Jane Fonda) relationship is the desire to communicate. “Talk to me,” says Addie as they lie in bed, looking at the ceiling in pitch darkness. After a lifetime of memories, there’s a lot to be said and a lot to be omitted. He confides in her about his extramarital affair, getting back with his wife and his unfulfilled desire of becoming an artist. She recounts the death of her daughter and the lasting impact it had on her life and family. For Haruf, these exchanges in bed are paramount and an indistinct part of the narrative, as can be seen with the peculiar omission of quotation marks. Dialogues, in Haruf’s work, blend seamlessly into exposition. Batra in his adaptation remains faithful to the source material, while elevating the dialogues to provide it with the importance it deserves.
In many ways, Louis and Addie are discovering each other like Jesse and Celine did in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), through words and shared reticence. Unlike Jesse and Celine, Louis and Addie have more than a night to them, but the uncertainty of the future remains. Batra borrows heavily, and at places precisely, from Haruf’s lines, retaining the dexterity with which Haruf understands human interaction. The film adds some light elements that are missing in the book, which work in favour of the film, like Louis sharing a toy train set with Addie’s grandson to wean him off of his mobile phone. But the film fails to fully capture their painful past – filled with regrets, mistakes, inadequacies and tragedies – as Haruf does. It sidesteps them all to focus on Louis and Addie’s evolving relationship, thereby weakening the conflict in the story.
As faithful as Batra’s adaptation may be, it can’t – and isn’t expected to – embody the entire book, even if it is just 179 pages. The filmmaker picks out the right parts and captures Our Souls at Night with sophistication and simplicity. With Our Souls at Night and his previous film, The Sense of an Ending, adapted from Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize winning novel, Batra dealt with books that aren’t too voluminous. What works well with an adaptation of Haruf’s novel is that the story is contained within the pages, but Barnes’ novel is powerfully compact and deceptively sized, where the story bursts out beyond the pages of the novel.
Ultimately, despite Haruf’s perceptive characterisation and Batra’s stylistically restrained approach, Louis and Addie’s true appeal lies in the two Academy Award-winning actors. “We all have history,” Addie reassures Louis, during one of their many conversations in bed. They indeed do. Redford and Fonda share an enviable level of comfort and chemistry, making it difficult to believe that the film reunites them after nearly four decades. At 79 and 81, with salt and pepper hair and lean bodies, Fonda and Redford look like the archetype of a romcom lead. And once you’ve read Haruf’s novel and seen Batra’s film, there’s no other way you can envision Louis and Addie than as Redford and Fonda.