Morgan Martini | Never Too Old / 2024

love and marriage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rolando Zee (screenplay), Morgan Martini (director) Never Too Old / 2024 [17 minutes]

 

Morgan Martini’s 2024 short film Never Too Old is a sentimental, feel-good film about the gay marriage of an elderly couple. Despite its excellent cinematography, its joyful music, and even nice costumes, accordingly, it has all the faults of such a genre which requires it to express, given Roland Zee’s script—he also plays one of the elderly duo, a former doctor named Jesse Payne—the sweet sentiments of a couple living together for 45 years.

     With his partner Florio Johnson (Gregory Niebel), who has been a recording producer, they live in beautiful surroundings. But Jesse has not wanted to marry, and it almost seems a fluke that suddenly, as they move on in age, he changes his mind and proposes.

     Frankly, it’s all too heterosexually normative to my taste, the one knee proposal replete with ring, Florio changing his last name, and at the wedding Florio holding a bouquet of flowers, approaching Jesse as if he were a "traditional" bride. Perhaps this 80-some year-old couple still hold conservative views of what marriage is about, but couldn’t Zee as writer shifted them just a little more into the present world?

     I say this since my husband and I also married quite late in life, 45 years after we had first begun our relationship in 1970, marrying in the year 2013 in which same-sex marriage became legal in California. But instead of playing traditional roles of husband and wife, our rings (which I purchased in a museum shop in Minneapolis for about $4.00, gold and blue expandable metal bands) were worn almost as a joke, we married in the Beverly Hills courthouse with my former employee Diana Daves McLaughlin and her husband John serving as our witnesses, after which we took them to a nice restaurant and then returned home; I think we ate in from Jack-in-the-Box that night. We did not change our names. But then we never performed as bottom or top and could not possibly imagine one of us taking a meaningless more-passive role. And we still verbally fight like two cocks.

   So actually I can very much relate to this feel-good film, and particularly with its bittersweet sentiment about this couple having married perhaps too late in life since within a few years Florio becomes ill and dies in Jesse’s arms.

     When Jesse despairs of finally not being able, as a doctor, to help his husband, Florio replies what both Howard and I know as well: “I’m old; you can’t fix old.” Both of us since our marriage have also had serious hospitalizations, surviving nonetheless. And clearly we recognize that we may have other such health problems facing us in the future.

     Yet I’ve never felt that legal marriage was a symbol of anything but our commitment to one another, and I never have perceived it as a representation of an ideal that either Howard or I strived for. We lived together without it for so long, both of us occasionally engaging in outside sex. Institutions have never been my thing, and marriage very much reads to me as a kind of meaningless institution. We legally married, in fact, because we had already become a stable couple, not in order to become one. Indeed, I see the imitation of heterosexual marriage as a kind of destructive force of the queer zeitgeist. After all those years of being described as “not the marrying kind,” I felt as someone who identified—despite anyone with whom I lived, loved, and shared my life for whatever period of time—as standing purposely apart and outside conformity and what had become to be perceived as normativity. Apparently, given the divorce rate, institutionalized marriage did not seem to be working very well for heterosexuals. Approximately 50%-56% of couples in the US divorce from a first-time marriage, the rates going much higher for a second marriage. And the most recent evidence seems to indicate that same-sex couples may follow that divorce rate. At times I wonder whether, in fact, that love and marriage are a pairing that belongs to the 18th and 19th centuries as expressed in the 1955 Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen song sung by Frank Sinatra: “Love and marriage. They go together like a horse and carriage.” After all, even automobiles now drive us.

      Perhaps that’s why in the film we are told that Jesse has waited so long to propose. But then why hadn’t Florio proposed to Jesse, arguing for marriage if he desired it? I think Howard and I both suggested that it might be okay to get married after our 43-years together at about the same moment. By that time we had little to gain* and nothing to lose. And we still celebrate the date our original pairing instead of the date of marriage, not nearly lasting nearly 56 years.

     It’s not the sentiments of this film, accordingly, that offend me, but the sexist role-playing, one of the elements that has generally been removed from gay life until recently.  

 

*As a same-sex couple the Federal Government had permitted us to file a join tax report for the last several years before we actually married and we had legally named each other our heirs.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).