Retirement Plan

Bluesky

If you plan to retire some time in the future, what will you do when it happens? Ray’s plans begin with responding to all of his flagged emails, and finishing all the books he’s started. There are a lot of different things on his list, but together they speak to a life lived too fast to keep up with, in which it was impossible to do anything properly – yet, for all that, an ordinary life. They suggest, also, that he has never had time to enjoy or take proper care of his body, the tragedy of course being that as he endeavours to do so in later life, it will gradually deteriorate.

Nominated for an Oscar, this modest little Irish film is interested in the intersection of vast ambition and small movements, of scope and particularity. Its deceptively simple animation shows Ray engaged in a variety of activities yet adjusts his body as little as possible, so that every movement is designed to tell us something, to contribute its own emotional nuance. Domhnall Gleeson provides the narration, as Ray, but director John Kelly used his own body to establish the movements necessary in each scene.

A lot of Ray’s plans involve self-improvement. Learning languages, learning to meditate, developing new skills. Where will this take him? He is full of optimism; at no point does he imagine himself becoming disabled or seriously frail, cut off from opportunity, yet he does imagine himself dying. Will that be it? Will there be any more time, afterwards? The film can be interpreted optimistically as suggestive of a full life, endlessly satisfying, at least if he is able to finance it all; or more cynically, as a story about missed opportunities which, inevitably, his limited time will prevent him from remedying in every case.

Retirement Plan is set in Dublin and drawn from life, set in real Dublin locations. Locals will have fun identifying them. This contributes to that specificity that lends weight to Ray’s flights of fancy. It’s an intimate and relatable film, likely to increase in value over time as it speaks to clearly to our current age.

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