A rogue elder, an uptight junior, the open road and a moral life lesson idling at the finish line – it’s a familiar handful of ingredients, and Northbound mixes them exactly as you’d expect. William Scoular’s feel-good, often very funny romp across the North American plains keeps the road trip rolling along nicely, even when you can see every fork in it coming a mile off.
Bruce Dern is the obvious pull here. He plays Arthur, a distillery-founding octogenarian who gets booted from his care home after a boozy golf-cart joyride. Dern brings the same flinty menace that earned him an Oscar nod for Nebraska, just softened slightly around the edges. He’s magnetic enough that you find yourself wishing the film let him off the leash a little more often. Arthur is determined to get back to the ex-wife he supposedly never stopped loving (Joanna Cassidy), and the whisky business he built from nothing. He somehow ropes his conflict-averse grandson, Kevin (Hunter Parrish), into driving the two thousand-odd miles from Arizona to Canada. Cue ninety minutes of generational sparring, most memorably when Kevin dismisses the Round Table of King Arthur as “a circle-jerk of toxic masculinity.”
The film picks up nicely when Adrien (Julia Fox) shows up as a hitchhiker with a fake disability and a big secret. It’s quite the pivot from the glitzy drama of her breakout feature Uncut Gems, but Fox is a welcome jolt of unpredictability. For a while, it seems as though Northbound might swerve somewhere more interesting, but Adrien’s storyline is quickly tidied away before it can complicate anything. Her character ends up feeling like the film’s biggest missed opportunity – alongside a brief cameo from the late Graham Greene – a reminder of just how much talent this film has assembled and how little it asks of most of it.
It’s a handsome trip, at least, with sweeping shots of tree-lined highways and great lakes passing by the car window. Scoular falls back on a soundtrack of oldies, with needle-drops so on-the-nose they sometimes border on parody. When the tearful farewell finally arrives, it is accompanied by the likes of Keane’s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ and M83’s ‘Wait’, bangers worn thin from a decade of doing the same job in a hundred other films.
It’s a shame a film with this cast and this potential chose not to aim higher. There’s a lingering sense that a spikier version of Northbound was well within reach, willing to let its elders raise a bit more hell. Even so, this is a funny, tender tale of reconciliation between a grandfather and his grandson. Dern remains a total joy, and there’s an authentic chemistry between him and Parrish that carries the film through its weaker patches. It’s a pleasant enough ride – warm, watchable and happy to colour inside the lines – just don’t expect any sudden turns.
