EDGE Miami

Two guys meet in a cancer ward and plot the hijinks they will enjoy during their last months of life. It hardly sounds like a holiday film (and, really, it isn’t), but director Rob Reiner makes it work.

The Bucket List gets its name from the itemized compendium of Things to Do Before You Die that Carter (Morgan Freeman) draws up before getting the bad news that all those bouts of chemo have not worked. At that point, Freeman is ready to throw his list away; but his roommate, Ed--who happens to own the hospital--has a better idea: retrieving the list, he adds a few items of his own (jump out of a plane, kiss the prettiest girl in the world), and then dares Carter to go ahead and live his dreams in the time he has left.

The two men sharing a room is ludicrously improbable, seeing as how Ed is a billionaire and Carter a mechanic, but once the film establishes their friendship, the two are a perfect match: Carter is erudite (as Morgan Freeman usually is), and Ed would like to be erudite, but will settle for being refined, sort of (he drinks expensive coffee with a hideous origin, a delicacy truly reserved for the most rarefied palate). But where Carter is staid and a little shy, Ed is boisterous, full of steam and anger; Carter would just as soon go home in resignation and wait for death, but Ed won’t hear of it. He’s going to chomp the bone of life until he gets that last little bit of marrow.

It helps that Ed has a private jet and a smooth, efficient assistant named Thomas (Sean Hayes) who, as every good Man Friday ought, keeps his boss on a short, though affectionate, leash. ("Have I fired you lately?" growls Ed at one point, to which Thomas replies, "Not since the Oprah incident.")

The movie has absolutely no subtlety about it; the first shot is a cigarette being ground out in a makeshift ashtray devised from a coffee can. Okay, we get it: ashes and urn. When Carter gives a mini-lecture to a young fellow mechanic about how Tesla, and not Marconi, is the real inventor of the radio, the kid--way too impressed with this--says, "You really are sick!" This Gen Y bit of slang coincides with the ringing of the phone; sure enough, it’s the doctor, announcing Carter’s bad news.

These missteps are not simply a clumsy means of introducing the film’s themes. They persist throughout. When Ed and Carter head off on their world jaunt, they stop over at conspicuous monuments to death: the Great Pyramids, of course, and the Taj Mahal.

Inevitably, conversations about religious faith find their way into the script, with Carter arguing for the existence of God and Ed shrugging the question off. The two have the good sense, and the sense of mutual respect, not to badger one another about these things. If the movie had left it there, it would have been just enough talk about spirituality to provoke thought and leave doors open; but later on, a sickly version of Eastern mysticism creeps in ("Everyone is everyone," writes Carter in a note to Ed, just before going in for surgery: maybe the drugs were already taking hold?), and it’s a half a step too far.

What the film lacks in delicacy it makes up for in location, and in style: Reiner allows the scenes to play out just a little longer than they might; every line of dialogue and every shot lasts a half a beat more than you’d expect. Reiner wants us to slow down, take a breath, and learn to appreciate: Ed, the ambitious go-getter, is fine as long as he remembers to go enjoy himself, and the fact that he’s wealthy enough to do so in marvelously appointed hotels perched on steep hills in gemlike French villages is mere window dressing. Carter, the hard-working and humble Everyman, has a chance to live life the way Ed does, and to his educated sensibilities it’s truly the trip of a lifetime; but Carter could get just as much joy out of a walk in the park. The two round one another out nicely, which is the point of buddy movies, and they have the inevitable falling out, and then the de rigeur last-minute reconciliation.

The timing of this film’s release is puzzler, but it’s worth seeing on the big screen for the scenery, if for nothing else. Not exactly a comedy, an far from the tragedy you might expect, this is a little film that plays out on a huge canvas. You probably won’t love it, but it’s likable enough.