In a title with built-in appeal for Mothers Day season roundups, filmmaker Sian-Pierre Regis shows how he made his aging mother Rebecca’s dreams come true, but it proves only part of a larger story about ageism in modern society.
Rebecca is a British national who emigrated to Detroit in the 1960s (were this to be somehow remade as scripted Hollywood kitsch, imagine an Angela Lansbury type). She married and divorced a white man in short order, then fell in love with a black man by whom she had two sons before discovering he was already married. Steady work for decades as a housekeeper in Boston hotels helped Rebecca survive as a single mum – with an additional challenge that her elder boy became schizophrenic.
But as she reaches her mid-70s, unfriendly management terminates her employment, and, despite Sian-Pierre’s coaching, she cannot find work in the 21st-century career field. To heal her despair, Sian-Pierre—whose vocation is a video journalist/filmmaker—compiles her “bucket list” of things she had always wanted to do and acquires upwards of $60,000 in a GoFundMe campaign to actualize. Typically heartwarming antics include milking a cow, skydiving, traveling to Hawaii, reuniting with a long-lost daughter in London, and learning hip-hop dance. But Rebecca's job loss and apartment-eviction woes continue (even though semi-celeb Sian-Pierre's stunt gets widespread human-interest coverage).
Duty Free wisely does not get too led astray in the mother-son sentiment to lose sight of a bigger, alarming picture—the plight of present-day seniors faced with heartless firings and hirings in a "market" clearly discriminating against older workers, many of whom have no retirement savings (or, for that matter, an influencer son, or deus-ex-machina social media, to come to the rescue). The feature thus addresses geriatric and social issues just as much as it portrays warm domestic relationships and ticks off the multiculturalism boxes. Recommended. (Aud: H, C, P)