‘Strangers in the Park’ Review: A Sentimental and Nostalgic Two-Hander on Aging and Memory (Netflix)

Herb Gardner’s stage play I’m Not Rappaport premiered on Broadway in 1985, winning the Tony Award for Best Play that same year. Starring Judd Hirsch and Cleavon Little, it centered on the extended conversations between two elderly men—one Jewish, the other African American—who meet regularly on a bench in Central Park. The play was a major success, spawning several revivals, and in 1996 Gardner himself directed a film adaptation starring Walter Matthau and Ossie Davis, “opening up” the material to include scenes only mentioned in the original theatrical version.

Something broadly similar now happens with the Argentine adaptation of that same play, titled Parque Lezama, directed by Juan José Campanella and originally starring Luis Brandoni and Eduardo Blanco on stage. Twelve years after its theatrical premiere, Campanella presents his own film version—one that diverges from Gardner’s in a key way. Instead of expanding the action and adding new settings, the director of The Secret in Their Eyes remains largely faithful to the original structure, keeping both the plot and the physical space confined to a few square meters of the traditional park located in the southern part of Buenos Aires.

Aside from the ethnicity of Blanco’s character—who is clearly not Black—the adaptation remains quite loyal to Gardner’s text and its local version, relying on a series of conversations between two elderly men over several days on a park bench. Blanco plays Antonio, a man losing his peripheral vision who suspects he’s about to be fired from his job as a building superintendent. The administrator’s insistence on speaking with him seems to confirm his fears. Brandoni plays León—or someone who claims to be León—a compulsive fabulist who embellishes his past to such an extent that even he may no longer know what’s real and what isn’t.

Their interactions begin awkwardly, with Antonio exhausted by León’s incessant talking and increasingly grandiose lies—among them, a supposed career in espionage. As they share stories of past loves, romances, and family life, León repeatedly emphasizes his political identity as a lifelong left-wing militant, a man committed to what he sees as just causes. Antonio, by contrast, is meek, cautious, and inclined to accept whatever fate hands him. So when the administrator (Agustín Aristarán) offers him a dreadful labor arrangement, León steps in and appears to secure a better deal. Or so it seems.

Strangers in the Park –that’s the English title– unfolds as evening gradually falls across each of these encounters. Other characters drift in and out: a young woman reading nearby (Manuela Menéndez), León’s estranged daughter (Verónica Pelaccini), and a thief and small-time dealer who roam the park, harassing the retirees and provoking confrontations they’re clearly ill-equipped to handle. Campanella makes no attempt to adapt the material to conventional cinematic logic—no streamlined dialogue, no shifting locations, no added narrative propulsion—preferring instead to preserve its essentially theatrical nature. To this he adds a syrupy musical score that operates on the same register as the film itself: retro, nostalgic, and unabashedly schmaltzy, underlining each emotional beat with the kind of insistence that borders on manipulation.

What does shift—almost imperceptibly—is the acting style, as the camera’s proximity inevitably alters the dynamics of facial expression and vocal nuance. Yet Brandoni and Blanco are performers of such demonstrative instinct that the transition feels minimal. Parque Lezama is about aging, the passage of time, lost loves, regret, and the growing indifference of younger generations toward their elders. It also looks back—through a haze of ironic nostalgia—at the years of political militancy and youthful rebellion.

More than a film, Strangers in the Park feels like a stylistic exercise, a kind of commemorative gesture marking years of collaboration: a memento of that decade in which, week after week and across more than a thousand performances, the duo carried this tender yet faintly acidic nostalgic comedy on their shoulders. The result is not a particularly strong film so much as a tidy staging of a text that, while still resonant in places, has lost much of the comic sharpness it once possessed. But Campanella owns the choice—from the conspicuously ’80s-style opening titles onward. This may be a contemporary production, yet aesthetically it belongs to the past—or rather, to an idealized past the director continues to revisit with persistent, contradictory, and ultimately rather endearing nostalgia. Pure, uncut schmaltz.