Sam & Kate

The novelty of Sam & Kate is in the casting, of having Dustin and Jake Hoffman play father and son, and Sissy Spacek and Schuyler Fisk play mother and daughter. The novelty inevitably wears off but what's under that gimmick is a surprisingly touching drama about death, aging, loss, and, yes, the bonds between aging parents and their adult children.

The title seems like a misnomer, as it begins with Sam (Jake) and Bill (Dustin), two generations of Jews in a small town somewhere in the heartland. Sam got out and had something like a career in comics, but when Bill gets too infirm to look after himself Sam moves back, takes a job at the same chocolate factory he worked in before college, and falls straight back into a deferred postgraduation rut. Bill grumps and complains, ignores medical advice, and throws a fit and a sausage when Sam tries to feed him something healthy, but in ways that are comforting to both. After all, as Bill notes, he hasn't got long left. That's just life.

Sam, however, has a little romance left in his heart, and so starts mooning over Kate (Fisk) after a chance meeting, followed by a second chance intersection of their paths, this time with both Bill and Kate's mom, Tina (Spacek), in tow.

In a less demanding film, of the kind that might have been greenlighted for the elder Hoffman and Spacek 30 years ago when they would first have been considered "too old" for Hollywood, double dating hijinks would have proliferated. There would inevitably have been a scene where the two generations met in rapidly wrapped sheets in a hallway, and the audience would get a cheap laugh about old people getting laid.

But Sam & Kate is not that film. There are a few sparks flying between Bill and Tina, but they only seem bright because of the twilight of their lives. And they are both difficult – Bill with his cantankerous nature, Tina with a quieter challenge that she keeps behind closed doors. That does not make them unlovable, and the connective tissue between them and their children – each navigating the increasing complexities of looking after an aging parent – is lovingly explored in the quiet, charming, and often touching script by first-time writer/director Darren Le Gallo.

And if this sounds like it could fall into mawkish cable tearjerker territory, there's more than enough of the respective charisma and more-than-proven talent of both generations of actors to give both depth and warmth to the story. Le Gallo's filmmaking resonates with Zach Braff's similarly themed Wish I was Here, with lives given a little more urgency because of the constant and purposefully ignored knowledge that life's end could be imminent. There're no big statements here, but charming observations. Neither Sam nor Kate is trying to change their parents, but instead quietly accept that's who they are and try to cherish them while at least softening their worst habits. At the same time, both Hoffman and Spacek bring that sense of ticking clocks with them, of a certain honesty earned by age and by a refusal not to live on their own difficult terms.

Amid all this there is also a tender little rom-com, with two somewhat-loves going on – more serious between Sam and Kate, more weatherworn and instantaneous between Bill and Tina (that tick-tick-tick never quietens). Its laughs are delicate, but as the film received its world premiere during the Austin Film Festival, the round of guffaws as Bill ogles a dancing Tina may have been one of the biggest the Paramount has ever heard. But there was no meanness in it, rather the sweet sound of recognition. Sam & Kate doesn't try to elicit big emotional responses, but that's exactly why it gets them.