Fred Won’t Move Out

Told with levity and sadness, two grown children and their aging parents struggle with the decision whether the older generation should stay in the house where they have lived for fifty years.

As performed with a generosity and emotional bravery that only a film icon of a certain age such as Elliott Gould could fathom, his Fred stands at the chasm between living alone with decreasing mobility in the house where he has lived for fifty years or leaving to live closer to his wife Susan (Judith Roberts), who has moderate Alzheimer’s and who the children are preparing to move to a care facility closer to them.

That his new home would be located in the same Manhattan neighborhood in which his emotionally disconnected son Bob (Fred Melamed) and his family reside doesn’t make the proposition any more attractive.

The emotional precipice on which Fred teeters at first seems most shaken by the shifting condition of his wife Susan; her dementia and ailing health has rendered her a mere shadow of her former self and, to Fred, a stark preview of that which is coming his way, too. Susan – his Susan, anyway – is on the verge of no longer being there.

That means the audience’s point of entry in this particular act of what director Ledes calls Cinemabricolage must by necessity take the form of Fred’s son Bob, whose daily professional and intellectual life as a self-absorbed New York filmmaker seems to have been interrupted by what have become increasingly necessary weekend visits to the home of his family of origin.

Though Bob seems to tolerate his much more emotionally in-touch sister (Stephanie Roth Haberle), he marvels at her precocious young daughter Lila, aka “the Captain” (Ariana Altman) while taking on the unpleasant but what he sees as necessary chore of somehow prying Fred off his homestead and into the City.

One concrete change Bob is inwardly happy about implementing right away: letting go of his parents’ music therapist (Robert Miller), a kindly man who has been coming around – and whom Bob has been paying -- for quite some time.

Just as the director has created as a foil his own double in the character of the son Bob, so too the music therapist, who—not by chance--is also named Bob, acts as an uncanny double for the son, who is all too happy to tell the music therapist that the departure of Susan and Fred for the city will mean his services will no longer be needed.

Fred’s son Bob must also face his own inability to penetrate his father’s oracular dissociative thinking that shields Fred from acknowledging the crumbling of the life he has built up in the same house over fifty years. And Bob is also just beginning to sense the deep connection his parents feel to the nurse’s aide, Victoria (Mfoniso Udofia), whose compassion and emotional pragmatism Bob is in no position to replace, even though the move means Victoria will soon no longer be part of their life.

Shot in the house where the directors’ parents lived for close to fifty years, just weeks after they moved out, the film's semi-autobiographical story is memorably acted by a small ensemble cast led by Elliott Gould. Shot in sequence in just three weeks with a heady mix of improvisational work by Ledes and his cast, the film's personal approach to its subject captures a universal story uniquely told.