This first ran at the Dissolve (which seems to be down at the moment, or quite possibly forever.)
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Taylor Guterson’s Old Goats is a basic male bonding flick. All the hallmarks are there. There’s the lothario, Bob. There’s the guy who’s scared of women, Brit. There’s the boring, point of identification, fellow in the middle with a perhaps-too-comfortable long-term commitment, Dave.

The movie does have a couple of gimmicks to liven up the old formula, though. First of all, the protagonists are all themselves. Bob Burkholder, Britton Crosley, and David Vander Wal all play a version of who they are in real-life, so that the film is supposed to be a semi-documentary. And the second twist is that the protagonists are all 65+. It’s Animal House post- retirement.

Animal House post retirement is different than Animal House in college in a number of ways. Rather than broad physical humor for a mainstream audience, it features quirky, low-key humor for indie-film goers. The non-professional acting adds a pleasantly scrappy amateurish feel to the proceedings. Dave in particular has a natural, awkward ease — it’s hard to resist the low-fi grace with which he grins and asserts, “I’ll be darned.” Brit’s almost blank distress as he burns his toast, or Bob’s irascible reaction to almost everything, are also charming in a way that it would be hard for professional actors to duplicate.

The film, then, gets a lot of mileage out of its protagonists’ clunky charisma. Perhaps too much. At times, the foregrounding of the old guys’ ineffable cuteness moves past endearing and towards something that feels disturbingly like condescension. In one scene, for example, a delivery-person comes to Bob’s room, where he’s preparing to have celebratory sex with his girlfriend. The delivery guy is decisively young, and he waggles his eyebrows and looks generally non-plussed to see the senior-age girlfriend in bed and Bob walking around shirtless. It’s as if director Guterson felt the viewers needed a perspective to identify with, a normative gaze from which to confirm that, yep, old people’s sexuality is adorable and amusing.

If the male characters are sometimes portrayed as specimens, the problem is only exacerbated with the women. The male buddy dynamic, here as elsewhere, is built on the incessant privileging of male-male relationships over male-female ones, so that the women end up as prizes, or obstacles, or rewards, rather than as people. This is perhaps most clear in Dave’s relationship with his wife Crystal (Gail Shackel), whom he neglects to spend time with Brit and Bob. At one point he leaves a dinner party in order to print out dating profiles for Brit. His wife comes upstairs to ask him, reasonably enough, what the hell he’s doing; he lies to her, and then starts scrolling through the profiles. His preference for the guys is then presented as infidelity — and infidelity which the viewer is encouraged to participate in, to a large extent. Brit and Bob are fun, after all; Crystal is an uptight shrew with hardly any screen time. It’s clear where one’s sympathies are supposed to lie.

Similarly, Bob’s girlfriend just about never speaks. Brit’s sweetie (Benita Staadecker) has a bit more to do, but even as the two fall in love, she’s figured in large part as a kind of uncomfortable inconvenience, pushing him first for sex, and then to move out of the junk-pit of a boat where he lives. Certainly, there’s never much of a sense of who she is, or even of why she’s particularly taken with Brit. Her story is not the one viewers are meant to care about, and that not caring is tied directly to the fact that she’s a woman, rather than one of the buddies.

The semi-documentary format and the age of the cast could have been used to undermine or think about the ways that male-bonding in films is used to erase or denigrate women. Instead, the twists are simply used to excuse the usual tropes. Crystal’s complaints about the way Dave has started frequenting an all-male club seem like they could be applied to the film as a whole. Even post-retirement, the film seems to say, guys will be guys, and women should go sit somewhere else.