‘Place to Be’ Review: Ellen Burstyn Carries a Corny Road Movie

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I have to be honest: As much as I love Ellen Burstyn — and who doesn’t love Ellen Burstyn? — the idea of watching a “lighthearted road movie” starring the 93-year-old Oscar winner, Taiki Waititi, Pamela Anderson and a pigeon filled me with a certain level of dread. I was thus rather pleasantly surprised, though definitely not convinced, by Place to Be, a sentimental if somewhat endearing friendship dramedy that could perhaps be described as Trains, Planes and Automobiles meets Harold and Maude, or something like that.

Directed by Kornél Mundruczó, who made several acclaimed features in his native Hungary before branching out into English-language fare like Pieces of a Woman and At the Sea, this offbeat gro-mance (if that’s what you call a buddy movie between a grandma and middle-aged bro) is at best an homage to the talents of the great Burstyn, who delivers a memorable performance despite some of the maudlin turns the story takes. After bowing out of competition in Venice, the film will probably find a place to be on streaming.

It’s encouraging to see the nonagenarian actress still going strong more than half a century after winning the Academy Award for her role as a struggling single mom in Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Not only was she present on the Lido for the premiere of Mundruczó’s movie, but Burstyn also starred as Marilyn Monroie in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s short film Flesh Impact, gave a masterclass and received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

The actress is the main reason to sit through Place to Be, in which she portrays a lonely, occasionally sharp-tongued widow named Brooke who finds a racing pigeon flying around her living room and decides to travel all the way from Chicago to New York to return the bird to its rightful owner. The far-fetched scenario, written by Mundruczó’s wife and regular collaborator Kata Weber, requires a certain leap of faith — or rather the skills of someone like Burstyn to make it not seem completely ridiculous.

While she’s waiting to take the train, Brooke runs into Nelson (Waititi), a divorced and down-on-his-luck real estate agent who desperately needs to sell a luxury apartment in Tribeca. The two start off more as frenemies than friends, but through a combination of happenstance and necessity, they wind up spending more and more time together, first on their way to Manhattan and then once they get there and Brooke can’t find a place to stay.

Burstyn and Waititi showcase some decent chemistry despite the latter’s slightly overcooked attempts at comedy, dishing out a few good lines while their characters mostly hang out and shoot the breeze. One memorable scene has Burstyn describing how turned off she was by the free love movement of the 1960s, in a seemingly improvised monologue that reveals she can still be both funny and genuine.

All of this happens while their characters are schlepping their lost bird around town, first visiting a rooftop coop in Bushwick that’s run by Lena Waithe, then heading out to Jersey to watch pigeons fly home to the finish line in a race involving big sums of money. Mundruczó already revealed his talent for shooting epic animal scenes in his 2014 Cannes prizewinner White God, and here he takes several, well, flights-of-fancy with his cast of birds, using a tad too much CGI to give those sequences a magical realist edge.

There’s a faint suggestion early on that the pigeon represents Brooke’s deceased husband, who was a famous painter and not necessarily the best father to her kids, Ron (David Wenham) and Molly (Pamela Anderson, nearly unrecognizable in a late-period Mia Farrow disguise). But the bird, which gets named Intruder, functions more as a MacGuffin to keep the plot moving and push Brooke and Nelson closer together.

That closeness gets a bit cringey in the third act — set on the Jersey Shore but shot in Australia — when it seems like things might teeter into a full-fledged romance between Brooke and Nelson that nobody wants to witness. But Place to Be is ultimately the story of a three-pronged friendship (the third prong being the pigeon) involving a trio of lost souls looking for affection and finding it in unsual ways.

If it weren’t for its exceptional lead, such a concept would probably drown in its own schmaltz. Not only does Burstyn make Brooke’s plight feel moving in places, but she brings a level of Actors Studio realism to a part for which her age and decades of experience play to her advantage.