We meet Richardson’s Jack first. He runs a tony London art gallery and seems to be quite good at his job. So when his partner in the endeavor—who also happens to be his wife, who’s divorcing him—announces her family is selling the gallery, he comes up with a plan to find the money to buy it from her. He’ll sell the Tuscan villa that’s been in his late mother’s family for generations. It’s just sitting there, empty, except for some packed-away furniture and all those painful memories. But he’ll need help from his estranged father to fix the place up and get it ready to list.
Neeson’s Robert is a once-promising artist who’s lost his creative spark. We know this because the camera pans around Robert’s mess of a studio to the helpfully tacked-up newspaper articles on the wall with headlines announcing him as the future of the art world. D’Arcy’s script features a lot of that kind of exposition and hand-holding. On their road trip to Italy, the two quickly fall into the same kind of banter they’ve always had, which is to say, none at all. Even awkward small talk quickly dissipates.
But in no time, jaunty music accompanies their journey into the sunny Italian countryside. As they loosen up and get reacquainted with each other, Robert reveals himself as gruff and randy, while Jack is sweet and romantic. The extremely watered-down shtick Neeson and Richardson are stuck doing is vaguely reminiscent of (and inferior to) the fun friction Sean Connery and Harrison Ford perfected in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”
Naturally, the house is in a far worse state of disrepair than they’d expected when they arrive. (The great Lindsay Duncan has some amusing moments as the uptight real estate agent who gives them tips on whipping it into shape.) But the nearby town is beyond adorable—the kind of place you’d expect to see Elio and Oliver blissfully riding their bicycles and calling each other by their names—which might put the seed of an idea in your mind that, hmm, maybe these guys won’t end up selling the house after all. Everybody knows everybody, and at night they all gather in the square to drink red wine and watch old, black-and-white movies under the stars.
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