[Movie 289 / Day 308]
Charlie Simms (Chris O’Donnell) is a kid from a poor family that is attending an exclusive prep school by means of a scholarship. In order to raise enough money to buy a plane ticket home for the holidays, he takes a job babysitting a blind war veteran, Lt Col Frank Slade (Al Pacino), for the Thanksgiving weekend. Just before he arrives to start the job however, he, along with rich boy George Willis Jr (Philip Seymour Hoffman), witnesses three of his peers setting up a practical joke in the school car park and inadvertently diverts a teacher who is about to spot them.
When the headmaster arrives the next morning, in his brand new Jaguar, it transpires he is the unfortunate victim of the prank, covering him and his car with white paint.
As the only witnesses, Charlie and George are called into the headmaster’s office and told that if they don’t shop their friends, they will be expelled. They are given the weekend to consider their positions before a meeting of the school’s disciplinary committee in front of the whole school. As an added incentive, the headmaster tells Charlie that if he blows the whistle, he’ll be recommended to Yale for the single scholarship on offer.
George tells Charlie not to worry, that he’ll figure something out and will call him over the weekend… But not to tell their parents.
Charlie goes off for a boring weekend babysitting a blind man. When he gets there however, it turns out Frank has other ideas. He’s been saving his disability pension for one last weekend of fun and has booked first class flights to New York and a suite in the Waldorf Astoria.
As the weekend goes on and Charlie and Frank grow from mutual dislike to friendship, it transpires that Frank intends this last weekend of fun to really be his last weekend and has brought along his sidearm to finish it off with a bang. And after all of that stress, Charlie still has to look forward to being expelled when he returns to school.
The movie is a bit schmaltzy, and a bit long, but it’s a good trip as we find out more and more of Frank’s backstory and watch as he spends his money vicariously on the things in life that brought him pleasure before he lost his eyesight. Al Pacino plays Frank very well, making it easy to see just how frustrated he is with being blind and living a life confined in a granny-annexe, and is even believably blind. Chris O’Donnell is pretty good as the wet kid who wants the best education he can get, despite being hampered by being skint.
With a gentle twist at the end, culminating in the court-room style disciplinary hearing (which features a fantastic speech), the movie is a decent coming-of-age drama.
My Rating: 
[ IMDB rating: 7.7 / 10 | IMDB link | Running time: 157 mins ]
