Screen icons Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Morena and Sally Field strive for the Super Bowl in this not-so-super sports-comedy. The only part of 80 For Brady that amused Eliza Janssen was its manic faith in Tom Brady’s godhood.
80 for Brady
I am not in the target demographic for 80 For Brady. To be fair, any country outside the US is apparently not within the film’s target demographic: it came out in the States a week before February’s Super Bowl, and has taken its sweet time doddering into theatres everywhere else.
But still, I find gridiron interminably dull, and I was at least 30 years younger than everybody else in my Sunday morning screening of the new sports-comedy. I am cool and young: sassy fridge magnet gags about how “reading glasses are designed to be lost” are, well, kind of lost on me. Could I still find some secret joy in 80 For Brady, despite mostly knowing its titular football Jesus as Gisele Bundchen’s ex?
Yes, thankfully—because the plot’s wild exaggeration of a gently amusing true story takes on a near-religious, fanatical tone that kinda fascinates. IRL, the “Over 80 For Brady” gang were five widowed New England Patriots fans who never made it to the Super Bowl, generating at most a few “awww quirky” local news headlines. In the film adaptation of that anecdote, Tom Brady is a Baal-esque figure of idolatrous miracle who has the ability to cure cancer.
With a shelf-bending collection of Oscars, Emmys, and Tonys between them, Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno and Sally Field have earned the privilege of doing this shit in their sleep. But they bravely seem to be having a truly good time for the most part, even when forced to navigate “modern” concepts such as ghosting or negging. Fonda is of course the group’s Blanche, seeking a new man and publishing erotic novels about Rob Gronkowski—one’s titled “I Gronk You A Merry Christmas”, when “The Gronk who Stole Christmas” is like right there. Moreno is still mourning her husband, unable to move on from the retirement home where they spent his last days, while Field is tired of mothering her own academic manchild of a partner (Bob Balaban, very slappable).
But our protagonist is really Lily Tomlin, firmly in her earthy tomboy wheelhouse. She first got the gals hooked on Tom Brady when their worshipful viewing of him every Sunday helped her through chemotherapy, but mere fandom is not enough (sorry, real people that the movie’s “inspired by”). As in Midsommar, their cultish icon requires a sacrifice of the elders, and so he speaks to Tomlin in the satanically animated forms of bobblehead dolls and TV broadcasts, urging her to make an expensive pilgrimage to the 2017 Super Bowl.
Unfortunately for me, there is no reference to Lady Gaga’s halftime show—but there is a way too long, very 2008-era gag about the ladies accidentally taking edibles and hallucinating visions of Guy Fieri. Billy Porter and 80s hunk Harry Hamlin are also allowed to perform some small acts of kindness to the women when their tickets to the big game inevitably go missing, but they’re mere heralds of true messianic might: Brady is the omnipotent Holy Trinity of producer, eponymous star, and MacGuffin, even getting to drop the film’s sole F-bomb in act three.
Grace & Frankie fans will already know that Tomlin and Fonda have proven chemistry, and their comfort together onscreen guides new besties Field and Moreno from tried-and-true platitudes about how “it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, what’s more important is who you’re doing it with”, etc. The legends bicker realistically over one another, with overlapping exaltations of “we’re going to the Super Bowl/I can’t believe we’re doing this/we are old!”. One wonders if Lily Tomlin was ever wistfully taken back to her days collaborating with Robert Altman on Nashville, a film with notably less product placement for the Microsoft Surface.
All that said, I’m being harsher than necessary on this perfectly adequate big-name vehicle. Middle-aged “football widows” will finally have a cute date night film that their hubbies can agree to, and Moreno does one fantastic, funny yell while waking up from a nap in the midst of an old-folks-home-heist. It’s just surreal to watch a bit of secular yet somehow faith-based entertainment where the Christlike figure is such an anonymous Lego man in presence: turning water to Bud Light before our very eyes (so…still water, pretty much). Watched as a double-feature with Air, also in cinemas, the films form a shoddy twin analysis of athletic devotion: of how men deify their greatest icons into immortality, and how women can look at those guys and remark that they are cute.
