‘Max Rose’ Review: Jerry Lewis Widower Drama Is a Clumsy Schmaltzfest

Meaty roles for older actors may be few and far between, but some things are worse than unemployment: namely, movies that trot out screen legends to provide an iconic cover for poor filmmaking.

[...] is the case with just-turned-90 Jerry Lewis‘ starring role in writer-director Daniel Noah’s “Max Rose,” a dispiritingly maudlin and clunky elder drama filmed more than three years ago, about an 87-year-old jazz pianist (Lewis) dealing with upsetting news about his recently deceased wife Eva (Claire Bloom).

The truest test for unrepentant treacle like this is to imagine how invested one would be if Lewis weren’t headlining his first movie in 20 years (since 1995’s “Funny Bones”), or if a great actress like Bloom weren’t seasoning a few flashbacks and daydreams, or if a comedy god like Mort Sahl wasn’t part of a cadre of veterans featured in a sequence at a retirement home.

When we meet Lewis’ newly widowed Max, accompanied by a pounding Michel Legrand piano score constantly vying for our attention, he’s in an epic sulk over learning that the woman he’d been happily married to for 65 years might have been unfaithful to him.

Sent to an assisted living facility after an accident, Max makes friends with a handful of retirees (played by Sahl, Lee Weaver and Rance Howard), whose conversational liveliness briefly give the movie some spark.

The most easily absorbed scene has the gang spending an evening listening to old jazz records, kibitzing and pretending to play instruments, with Lewis showcasing a bit of his pantomime virtuosity.

Noah needs to bring his Max-Eva mystery to a close, though, which leads to a scene in the Bel Air palace of a movie producer (Dean Stockwell), and a tritely emotional journey afterward, which all somehow manages to feel simultaneously overwrought and undercooked.