Forever Young (1992)

Forever Young arrives from 1992 with the confidence of a studio picture that knows exactly what it is: a cryogenics romance with a bomber plane bolted on. Mel Gibson plays a 1939 test pilot who asks his scientist friend to freeze him for a year so he will not have to watch his beloved die. He wakes in 1992 instead, fifty-three years late, in a dusty warehouse, greeted by a boy named Nat who likes airplanes. The plot machinery is nonsense and the film seems aware of it, which accounts for a good deal of its mild charm. It aims for the heart and mostly hits the sleeve.

For a premise that could carry any number of messages, it carries almost none. Joe Morton appears in a supporting role and the film does nothing with him, which is less a criticism than a description of the era. Jamie Lee Curtis plays a single mother escaping an abusive ex-boyfriend, and the screenplay treats her as a warm presence and a love interest, nothing further. The movie has no interest in naming the structures surrounding her. Race is not a subject. Money is not a subject. The body, the mind, the climate, the past: all of it arrives as texture, none of it as argument.

There is an innocence here that now reads as antique. The film's relationship to history is nostalgic, not corrective. Its 1939 is a place of noble pilots and loyal friends; its 1992 is a place of kindly strangers and federal agents who are merely inconvenient. The sentiment is gooey, as the trades observed at the time, and it functions on its own terms regardless. For the purposes of classification, this is a gentle romance with a child sidekick and a substantial aging-makeup budget. It wants to make you cry, not to instruct you. That distinction is worth preserving, and this picture preserves it largely by accident.