Aging American beauty

>> Septuagenarian Newman looks good in Where the Money Is

By JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

Where the Money Is is the kind of movie my grandfather would have liked. Which is to say it's in the tradition of Tough Guys, a film where Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, well into their seventies, played crotchety old ex-cons who still knew how to kick ass.

Money is a good old-fashioned caper. Paul Newman plays Henry, a career bank robber who decides to fake a stroke to get moved from prison to a nursing home. Once there, he meets a nurse (Linda Fiorentino) who figures out his stroke-mouth's a con and convinces him to come out of retirement for one last heist.

Watching someone shed their old age and sickness like it were all a simple scam is magical. Newman makes you believe what those ads from the '80s, where seniors take a swig of soda and start playing hackey sack on the roofs of Camaros, were trying so hard to tell us: that acting old is a kind of performance.

As you watch the 75-year-old Newman take Fiorentino out onto the dance floor, you really believe a younger woman would be taken with him (unlike, say, watching Nicholson woo Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets). Her husband (Dermot Mulroney) looks on, feeling what I imagine to be a little bit of what I was feeling: awe and envy.

Money isn't great art, but Newman's performance is affecting in its simplicity; not only is he as beautiful as always, but old age has heightened his onscreen humility.

Each generation turns to certain figures to exist as the group's collective dream self. Men in their fifties need only watch Mick Jagger, prancing around in skin-tight pants, to feel that the five-oh still has surprises, just as men in their sixties can turn to Warren Beatty as a dose of Viagra for the soul. Newman has the power to make septuagenarians feel not only empowered, but really cool. I hope Johnny Depp looks as good when I'm watching his latest holograms on my death bed.

Where the Money Is opens Friday, April 14