Forty year old men in movies

I’ve been on this planet for forty years, and I’m no closer to understanding a single thing.

source

says Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation.

Forty years old, and I’ve never done a single thing I’m proud of.

says Harvey Milk, early in Milk.  It’s his fortieth birthday when we meet him:

The film then flashes back to New York City in 1970, the eve of Milk’s 40th birthday and his first meeting with his much younger lover, Scott Smith.

Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams tells us he’s thirty-six:

Annie and I got married in June of ’74. Dad died that fall. A few years later, Karin was born. She smelled weird, but we loved her anyway. Then Annie got the crazy idea that she could talk me into buying a farm. I’m thirty-six years old, I love my family, I love baseball, and I’m about to become a farmer. And until I heard the Voice, I’d never done a crazy thing in my whole life.*

but that was in 1989, when, believe it or not, life expectancy was 3.89 years shorter.

Then of course there’s:

and

What’s going on here?  Is it because forty years old is about when (male) directors get the chance to make movies like this?

Are there movies about explicitly forty year old women? None leap to mind.

There are several movies about a ~ thirty year old woman’s crisis. Bridget Jones, My Best Friend’s Wedding – but I can’t think of forty year old women appearing with such clear declaration.

Could it be the actors? This is when make actors tend to be developed in their craft, at the peak of their power, empowered to wrestle with material they choose.

Is forty when a man straddles a divide between the freedom of youth and the responsibilities of adulthood? He MUST make some choice? Does that choice make for a movie?

Maybe it’s simpler than all that.

Let’s say you just turned 40. Obviously, 40 is just a number, but in many ways, it’s a milestone. Though people are living longer these days into the 80s and 90s, still age 40 is considered the halfway mark.

(That’s from this article on Seeking Alpha.)  

Maybe it’s just the halfway mark.  When you get to halftime you ask, how am I doing?  “Make adjustments,” as the football coaches always say.

In the middle of the journey of our life

I found myself in a dark forest,

for the straight way was lost.

Not a bad way to start a story. (Dante’s Inferno, Canto I, translated by Google)

* Ray Kinsella says that before he heard the Voice, he’d “never done a crazy thing in my entire life.” But earlier in the same speech he tells us:

I marched, I smoked some grass, I tried to like sitar music, 

Sounds like a guy who’s at least experimental (or is he saying he did all the cliché things of any ’60s college student?). 

Ray also says that (along with Annie) he bought a farm in Iowa, the “idea” of which was, his words, “crazy.” 

I think Ray protests a little too much here. I think he is the type who would at least consider a crazy thing.  Perhaps that openness is part of why the Voice chose him.