I note that people either love or hate this flick. Add me to the haters.My fundamental problem is that the whole premise is implausible. I mean, the deadbeat bum got offered 9 million Euros for the building. Close to ten million bucks. But I guess in true New Yorker fashion, he had to hold out for 12 million. A person of his character would be on a first-class jet back to the Big Apple and starting on his coke habit 20 seconds after signing the contract. But then we wouldn't have all the other implausible drama.Every major character was deplorable. Kevin Kline played a dead-beat bum and a whiny man-child. You can blame your grandparents (I'm Irish so I drink!) or you can blame your parents (Mommy didn't love me!) but here in real life we become adults and we can shape our own personality independent of genetics or upbringing. He is also a thief, stealing furniture to sell off for pocket change. His alcoholism and his relapse is almost to be expected. Of course he is an extortionist, shaking down the developer for cash at every opportunity.Deplorable #2 is Maggie. She's an adulteress that is not even sure of the paternity of her own daughter. She is also a venal gold-digger, that only stayed with her husband since he was rich. To top things off, rather than get a job and keep her apartment building in the family, she follows her bum muse, and sells it off in a kind of private reverse mortgage.Then there is deplorable #3, the daughter. She is another bum that needs to live with her mommy so she does not have to work too hard or find a husband. In addition, she is a mistress home-wrecker, just like mommy. Selfish to the core, she only worries about the affect of Keven's appearance on herself. What a peach.They are from a milieu of deplorables. Kevin's dad is an adulterer, obviously. This man so full of love he needs side action does not have enough love to play catch with his sullen spoiled little boy (or leave him an inheritance). Kevin's mom is a piece of work. A passive-aggressive narcissist that repeatedly tries to kill herself, and finally succeeds in blowing her brains out in front of her young son. Zappa comes to mind, "You better get it right the first time, 'cause there's nothing worse than a suicide chump." I guess with a wife like this there is no wonder the dad cheated on her. Maggie's husband has such low character he stays married to her despite knowing he is being cuckolded.The only decent people are the doctor, the real estate agent, the gal singing opera, and the shopkeeper that bought the stuff from Kevin. The developer might be hated by some people, but he is only trying to make Paris modern, and provide more housing. He was also a man of his word, letting Kevin extort him based on promises. They get a total of 3 minutes of screen time.The fact that the deplorables are considered normal by the scriptwriter is the best reason to never live in a big city like New York.OK, so how do we fix this mess? I can see a murder mystery. Make Maggie even more rotten. Make the daughter much nicer. Maggie is killed. The movie would implicate Kevin, who is, after all, a creep. Then he gets put in prison, and we find the daughter really is his sister, so she can file a claim and get the house, and who cares if it will be in court for a decade, she has a place to live. Agatha Christie with a level-1 Shyamalan.Or make it a thriller. Kevin kills Maggie, which does save a lot of budget, and we watch that real estate agent, now cast as a detective, solve the crime. Halfway through, Kevin learns the daughter is his sister, and he is trying to kill her too. Now we have the damsel in distress. Make the doctor the detective's sidekick, she is so sweet and hot, can't lose with that casting. Have the developer as a love interest for the daughter, so they can get married and she ends up the property anyway. Jules Maigret crossed with Columbo.

A beautiful house in Paris is the setting for this troublesome drama where the presence of a little old lady (Maggie Smith at her most passive/aggressive gentleness) turns the new owner's (Kevin Kline) world upside down. He inherited the house from his late father and discovers much to his confusion that as the owner, he must pay rent to Smith and her rather serious daughter, Kristin Scott Thomas, who has enough troubles of her own to add him to her list of problems. Smith, it is quickly revealed, was an acquaintance of her father's, and as the lines of communication open between the three, more facts are revealed that turn Kline back to the bottle, break up Scott's own relationship with a married man, and reveal secrets that are heartbreaking and often shocking.You can never go wrong with any movie that stars the now legendary Smith, the British Katharine Hepburn, whose tenacity to continue working has made her beloved. This isn't a Jean Brodie Maggie Smith, nor a Dora Charles Maggie Smith of "Murder By Death", and she is as far from her Lady Violet Crawley as she is from Little Lord Fauntleroy. A character of gentle breeding and much class, she teaches English to Europeans of other cultures living in Paris, and in one scene, must explain to one of her pupils of the very sexually explicit meaning of the book they are reading. There is no shock on her face, just minor amusement, and even when she confronts Kline with his return to the bottle, it is with much tenderness and concern. It turns out she knows more information as to why he drinks, and when Kline shares his most shocking secret with her, it is written on her face ever so briefly that her whole world is shattered because of it. The bond with Scott grows too, and they all learn that underneath their initial distrust of each other, they are now bonded forever.This takes much patience to get into, but the three stars do their best to help the viewer maintain intentions. It is a gentle movie, almost nurturing in a way, and leaves the viewer with a very important lesson of how the generations create gaps simply because they unwillingly refuse to understand the older or younger ones. As old Rose said in "Titanic", "A woman's heart carries many secrets", and in the case of Smith's Mathilde Girard, she has more than her alleged 90 years can hold. The three give brilliant performances, almost quiet to the point where it seems like they are not at all acting. It's one of those sleeper movies that you'll have to sleep on to really be affected by it and one where your own relationships with older relatives, especially parents, will be forced out of whatever hiding spot they hold in your soul.

The hero, played by Kevin Kline, appears to be an immature 57 year old obsessed with money. He has inherited an apartment in Paris but can't convert it to cash because an elderly lady, played by Maggie Smith, has a lifetime lease.Spouse and I agreed that the script was poor and the hero thoroughly unlikable. I was ready to stop watching when he grabbed money from another man's wallet. The clincher was his righteous moralizing to a woman (the old lady's daughter) who was having an affair with a married man.Was hoping for something with the kind of witty sparkle that Maggie Smith provides in her Downton Abbey role. Instead, just a flat story with little going for it but the beautiful Paris setting.

The problem with "My Old Lady" is that it suffers from an excess of good taste and a severe dearth of a good plot. Kevin Kline is the down-on-his-luck American who inherits a Paris apartment together with its 92 year old tenant Maggie Smith and her daughter, Kristin Scott Thomas and he has them until Smith dies. Not only that but he must continue to pay Smith 2,400 euros a month. As written and directed by Israel Horovitz from Horovitz's original play, nothing of any consequence happens. The three principal performances are fine but the material is gossamer thin. It's the kind of idea that might have seemed good at the time but which came to nothing. It might have made for a decent 30 minute short but stretched out to feature length it's almost unendurable. Paris looks nice though but even Paris can't save it.