Camilla movie review & film summary (1995)

Of course, like all veteran troupers, Miss Tandy gave more than one farewell performance. She also can be seen in "Nobody's Fool," as an old woman who was once Paul Newman's grade school teacher and is now his landlady. In "Fried Green Tomatoes" (1991), she was an old lady in a nursing home, telling a remarkable story from her youth. In "Cocoon" (1985) and its sequel (1988), she and Cronyn played an old couple offered the gift of youth, which she eventually rejected. The late performance she will be best remembered for, of course, is in "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989), for which she won the Oscar as best actress.

These performances, taken together, show an elderly woman of great dignity and strength, stubbornness and eventual warmth. What "Camilla" adds to the palate is humor and some naughtiness: Who but Tandy would appear, in her mid-80s, in a skinny- dipping scene? (Her spirit, if it looks down, must be vastly amused that the scene helped win the movie an MPAA warning about "discreet nudity.") "Camilla" is worth seeing because of Tandy and Cronyn, and because of a fine performance by Bridget Fonda, but it is not, unfortunately, a very good film.

Everything about the screenplay hints at contrivance. We do not much believe the central situation in the story, and we certainly can't believe the details, so the script becomes simply a series of excuses to get the characters to where they are needed. Fonda plays a young woman who takes music seriously. She is on vacation on an offshore Georgia island with her husband, an advertising artist. He considers her music "only a hobby," but Camilla (Tandy), whom she meets by accident, takes it seriously, and brings out a yellowing clipping from her own long-ago musical career.