Old – really old – college buddies Claire (Jane Fonda) and Evelyn (Lily Tomlin) find themselves reunited at the funeral service for their mutual friend Joyce. Evelyn was once secretly Joyce’s lover, and Claire harbors a more disturbing secret: nearly half a century ago, her life was destroyed when Joyce’s husband, Howard (Malcolm McDowell), raped her and went unpunished. (“They wouldn’t have believed me. I mean, back then?”) Now that Joyce is departed and Claire no longer has to worry about hurting her friend with the revelation, she resolves to exact her tardy vengeance and do away with Howard, with Evelyn being recruited as a reluctant accomplice. Unconvincing, unfunny, and hideous from start to finish, Moving On is an arthritic, demented, and incontinent revenge dramedy that will only appeal to people mentally ill enough to believe E. Jean Carroll’s allegations against Donald Trump. If, instead of making this movie, writer-director Paul Weitz had simply stuck a thumb up his butt, sniffed it, and snickeringly wiped it on the door of a church, his accomplishment would have been no less artful. Weitz, judging by his work in Moving On, is the perfect embodiment of what Michael Peinovich has termed “regression to the hebe” – a phenomenon which sees an unsubtle and talentless generation of privileged Jews coasting on the agglomerations of power and influence inherited from their more capable forebears.  

One out of five stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Moving On is:

Anti-family. Claire cares more about her dog than her biological relatives and at no point displays affection for them. Intended to be funny, her dog-mom status only succeeds in establishing her as an insanely icy, unsympathetic character. She later reveals that her unencouraging father – another example of an odious white man – damaged her self-esteem when he used to call her “Little Loser”.

Pro-miscegenation. Until the night she was savaged by a horrid, drunken white man, Claire had enjoyed a trailblazing marriage to sensitive black chef Ralph (Richard Roundtree). Traumatized by the attack, however, Claire was emotionally destroyed and incapable of remaining a wife. Forty-six years later, however, the newly assertive Claire gets back together with Ralph, going to bed with him in one of the most awkward, unwelcome love scenes in movie history, subjecting viewers to the atrocity of Fonda squishing the rubber remains of her face against that of the almost-dead star of Shaft. Ralph, in stark contrast to the sexist and selfish Caucasoid Howard, is a consummate gentleman of superior caramelization, and even asks for Claire’s permission: “May I kiss you?” As Claire muses when she inspects herself in the mirror of Ralph’s bathroom before their evening of putrescent passion: “Are you fucking serious?”

Groomerist. Evelyn, Claire’s creepy old Jewish lesbian friend, of course likes to interact with children, and an especially offensive subplot of Moving On involves her friendship with a little boy, James (Marcel Nahapetian), who visits her in her retirement home to play “fashion show”, trying on her earrings. “Time will tell” if James is a boy, after all, she insinuates. In a disturbing scene toward the end of the film, the Jewess aggressively continues to try to influence the boy as his parents are eager to get him out of her clutches. “I wish I was your grandmother!” she cries, adding, “Never say never, kid! You look great in rhinestones!” By the end of the movie, I was wondering how Lily Tomlin would look in striped pajamas.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.