Avoiding a de-aged Billy Crystal

There are two common ways of showing an actor playing a younger version of his or her character: 1) make the actor look as young as possible, even if it's ridiculous; 2) cast a different actor.

Billy Crystal thought of a third way, and maybe it's the best way: Don't show the younger version on screen at all.

One of three movies I downloaded in the Kakadu National Park visitor center the other day, so as not to place too much stress on our limited amount of data (we don't have WiFi in our rooms here on holiday in the Northern Territory), was Here Today, Billy Crystal's 2021 film that I'd never heard of until it just popped on Netflix the other day. Tiffany Haddish is his extremely charming co-star.

Crystal's character is in the early stages of dementia, and there is a lot of reflecting back on his wife who died 20 years earlier. She's shown at the correct age in these flashbacks and is played by Louisa Krause. He's not shown at all.

How do they manage this? Well, the scenes are just shown from his perspective, where you can hear his voice but you never see his face. Which makes sense, because they are his memories, so he's not likely to appear in them now is he?  

If more filmmakers don't do this -- I should have specified that Crystal is this film's director in addition to its star -- then it could be because the first-person perspective is generally something filmmakers try to avoid. There's something -- uncanny is not the right word, but you get what I mean -- about seeing the world from the perspective of a particular character, meaning you don't actually see that character. It's kind of similar to if you are showing the world from the perspective of a family pet. It's not serious filmmaking.

But why can't it be? It is certainly the most realistic version of a memory. We are not trained to find a person speaking to the camera as a natural mode in fiction filmmaking, but it's not only closer to the truth, it also solves a lot of problems. No we don't have to worry about whether the younger actor they chose looks like Billy Crystal, or heaven forbid, we don't have to see the 73-year-old version of Crystal -- which is how hold he was when he made the movie -- appearing as a 40-year-old. 

Here Today has all sorts of clever ways of handling aging. Sharon Stone and Kevin Kline have guest spots in this movie, playing themselves as the stars of a hit movie Crystal's Charlie Burnz wrote 30 years ago. We see a clip from that movie, and it's Stone and Kline -- but they are both wearing Halloween costumes that feature masks, so we can't get a proper gauge on their ages.

The other person who appears as themselves, in a manner of speaking, is Jerry Orbach, who has been dead these past two decades. A crucial part of the plot has to do with a play Charlie wrote some 20 years ago, which starred Orbach. Of course this is not a real play, but the use of Orbach's real name definitely further places Charlie in our world. And I doubt anyone in Orbach's family was opposed to it. After all, this is comedy legend Billy Crystal we are talking about here.