Review: Land Ho!

City Paper grade: B+

A well-worn genre is brought to bottomlessly charming life by Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens, who send mismatched codgers Paul Eenhoorn and Earl Lynn Nelson on a road trip through Iceland. Eenhoorn, last seen in the quietly moving This Is Martin Bonner, plays peevish and uptight without passing on his annoyances to the viewer, but the movie’s real star is Nelson, a foul-mouthed plastic surgeon whose only acting roles have been in Stephens’ few films. (She’s his second cousin, and about four decades his junior.)

Were it not for the gusto with which Nelson approaches his role as a retired doctor, his character could easily come off as a caricature, a dirty old man who funnels his desires into everything but sex. (When the two stop by an exhibition of vaguely suggestive art, he doesn’t hesitate to bring the subtext to the surface.) But you gradually develop the sense that the character is a put-on as well, or at least a deliberate externalization: He’s using his age to get away with things he’s wanted to say his whole life. Eenhoorn, by contrast, is still swimming in worries, bedeviled by debt and professional dead ends, but his unexpected weakness for Jim Carrey movies hints at a playful side that’s just waiting for a chance to be seen. (No points for guessing if it does.)

Land Ho! doesn’t reinvent the wheel: The scenes where its two protagonists pick up up much younger women and smoke a little weed are like low-key riffs on the likes of Last Vegas. But the movie’s more tender than it is crass: The aforementioned pickup, which includes Nelson playfully leering at his much younger cousin (Karrie Crouse), is purely platonic, just a case of two older men flexing their muscles to make sure they’re still there. It’s a warm soak rather than a squirt in the eye.