Brett Haley's 'Dreams' brings an audience to a cast of a certain age

Here's a safe prediction: Disney's sci-fi fantasy "Tomorrowland" will be the big box-office winner this weekend, easily beating out the new remake of "Poltergeist." But as the season of popcorn flicks - most of which are geared toward younger audiences - kicks into high gear, it's refreshing to know that you can still find a few wrinkled faces at the movies, both on screen and in the seats.

"I'll See You in My Dreams" has a main cast - Blythe Danner, Sam Elliott, Rhea Perlman, June Squibb and Mary Kay Place - whose average age is 72. Or 65, if you count "Silicon Valley's" Martin Starr, who, at 32, is the cast's baby. Although the film pairs Danner and Elliott romantically, it derives much of its unexpected charm from the platonic friendship that develops between Danner's Carol, a widow in her 70s, and Starr's Lloyd, a pool boy who doesn't know what to do with his life.

More unexpected are the movie's box-office numbers. "Dreams" pulled in the second-best per-screen average when it opened in limited release last weekend, trailing only "Pitch Perfect 2" and handily beating out "Mad Max: Fury Road."

This does not surprise the director of "Dreams," Brett Haley, who notes that his film received a standing ovation by an audience of 1,500 at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

"There's a huge audience of older people who go to the movies," says Haley, 32. "They go to the movies more than a lot of demographics, and they can make something a hit if they like it."

"Huge" might be an overstatement, but it's certainly healthy. According to a 2014 study of theatrical market statistics by the Motion Picture Association of America, the number of "frequent moviegoers" in the 60-plus demographic (that is, those who attend the cinema at least once a month) jumped almost 30 percent last year from 2013, to 5.3 million viewers. That is the highest level for the 60-plus demographic since 2010. Over the same period, attendance by frequent moviegoers ages 18 to 24 and 25 to 39 - still the dominant age groups, with annual attendance about 7 million each - continued to slide.

But the pickings are sometimes slim for mature audiences looking for characters their age appearing in quality fare: "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" and its sequel are rare exceptions, along with such recent films as "Danny Collins" and "5 Flights Up." On the horizon, look for "Grandma" (Aug. 28), starring a salty 75-year-old Lily Tomlin.

Haley says that the problem is not a dearth of older characters, but a dearth of older characters in believable situations. Premises are too often self-consciously "wacky" and far-fetched, he says, rendering aging as something unnatural, or a process to be denied.

"I don't want to bad-mouth other people's films," he says, "but there are a lot of films featuring people of my movie's age range that are based on the premise of quote-unquote 'old people' doing young things."

Although he won't name names, Haley dismisses the generic movie trope of "old people going sky diving" (which sounds suspiciously like an infamous scene from the cheeseball "The Bucket List," starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson).

In his movie, the most intense action sequences revolve around Carol and Lloyd singing karaoke or their attempt to catch a rat that has gotten into her house.

Haley cites "Beginners" (2011) and "Philomena" (2013) as films that get aging right - and, more specifically, get the shared dynamic of older and younger characters right. Like those movies, Haley says, "Dreams" isn't about people looking back on their lives and regretting the mistakes they've made. Rather, he says, "this movie is about older people looking forward." Why should that sense of hopefulness, he wonders, be the purview of the young?

The lack of diversity in cinema extends to gender and race as well as age, says Haley, although he, like Danner's Carol, believes there's a better future coming.

"Of course, the studios are going to make 'young, pretty people doing things' movies. That's always going to be a thing. But I don't know how someone can go to the movies this summer and just see one big, huge explosion movie after another. People are hungrier for real movies. If more smaller films like this can be made, I really do think there's an audience for them."

Besides, he says, today's audience for "Tomorrowland" will one day start searching for an on-screen world that looks a little more like their own, along with characters who have even more gray hair than George Clooney. "If we're lucky," he says, "we're all going to get old."