John Kelly sent Domhnall Gleeson a message including the music intended for his short film Retirement Plan and The Paper actor tells Deadline it was a quick yes from him to providing the voice of Ray, the picture’s protagonist. “It had such a strong identity, it knew itself so well,” says the star, recently back from Sundance with his latest movie The Incomer. “It really struck a chord, and has ended up being one of the things I’m proudest of from the last few years, because it’s exactly what it needs to be and speaks to a lot of people.”
He adds: “When I read it, the main thing was that it was funny and it was very poignant without being overly sentimental. It’s really beautiful and all of this [Oscar attention] is icing on the cake.”
Gleeson is alluding to the Oscar nomination the film has in the Best Animated Short category. In Europe it has gotten wider visibility after dropping on Disney+ along with several of the shorts in the Academy Awards race.
In the film we see Ray ruminating upon various stages of his future life – and death. He recounts a list, of sorts, of the things he will do when he retires: He will be more present; he will grow veg; he will haunt an old nemesis from school; before that, he will even get a pension (before he retires, of course).
The film received both the Grand Jury Award and Audience Award at SXSW earlier this year and Kelly also took home the Best of Fest award from the Palm Springs International ShortFest and the Comedy Award from the Indy Shorts International Film Festival.
It has elicited different reactions from its audience. “It is a bit of a Rorschach test based on where you are in your own life,” says Dublin-based Kelly, who penned Retirement Plan with New York-based writer Tara Lawall. “We wanted to be deliberately neutral with that sound base and artistic style, and it can go in different directions depending on your own mood.”
Gleeson picks up the thread. “It’s one of those mad pieces of art that is genuinely universal. Everybody worries in some way about the future, and so it resonates with people who are young and starting out and have no idea where their lives are headed, and with middle-aged people like me who are sort of at the midpoint and you don’t know what’s ahead, and you don’t know what you make of what’s behind. And then older people, I think, really see themselves in it too.”
Mortality and a sense of life maybe passing you by are themes running through the film. “What it evokes in me is a desire to overcome that apathy, which we all can have, just letting your life happen to you,” Gleeson says.
In terms of the death part of the tale, he adds: “There’s just a little bit towards the end, about the getting old and the moving on to the next place of it all and it offered me a funny sort of solace, because this guy isn’t pretending like he knows it all. He’s wondering about it. I found something bizarrely comforting in that.”
Kelly chips in: “Domnhall talks about finding solace and death is not something that we naturally want to spend that much time thinking about. I started thinking about it more and more as my parents got older… that’s really healthy and this film is a bridge towards that in a positive way.”
An Oscar nom is a springboard for any filmmaker and Kelly is already working out what happens post-Retirement Plan. When asked by Deadline what’s next, the writer-director reveals he is working on an animated documentary: “It’s about the time I woke up 10 years ago with a giant rat on my chest at five in the morning, and then myself and my wife spent the three most intense hours of my life trying to chase it out of our bedroom.”
