If nothing else, Just Getting Started (currently in commercial release) tells the world that writer-director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump) enjoys being an old man. The film, an amiable and instantly forgettable comedy, offers an idealized picture of semiretirement, with sexagenarian and septuagenarian characters enjoying easygoing lives filled with sex, golf, and gambling. It takes place at an upscale gated community in Palm Springs, California, and for the first half hour, Shelton does little but bask in how nice it is to live there. To call Just Getting Started laid-back would be an understatement; the movie is a slow golf cart ride into complacency. At the screening I attended, one man in the audience stretched out on three chairs (his row was empty) and proceeded to take a nap. I think he had the right idea.
The climactic 20 minutes of Just Getting Started are so lazily directed that I wondered why Shelton bothered trying to put action into the movie at all. The film’s modest strengths lie in its inaction, the passages when Shelton drops the veneer of telling a story and just lets the characters hang out. As in Hawks’s later work (or, for that matter, the later movies of Robert Altman and Eric Rohmer), the relaxed pace invites you to enjoy spending time with interesting people with stories to tell. Jones’s character has a cool backstory, having traveled the world first in the military and then as a business investor; he also recites poetry and paints. The film hints at the charming character study it could have been whenever Jones reflects on his past. It’s in these moments that Just Getting Started becomes more than a commercial for old age—Shelton delivers a sense of nostalgia and loss, giving the film unexpected depth.
