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Soon Ethel is harder at work than usual as a go-between. Chelsea arrives with her new lover, Bill (well played by Dabney Coleman), a dentist whose laid-back manner does not hide a will hard as a platinum inlay. Then there is his 13-year-old son, Billy (Doug McKeon, who gets the bravado, vulnerability and candor of adolescence just right). He is toughing out a feeling that since Mom and Dad divorced he is essentially homeless, that the idea of dumping him with the old folks while Dad and Chelsea go to Europe is desertion.
Things do not begin promisingly.
Norman will still not concede his daughter is an adult ("Look at this fat little girl" is his greeting), and soon he is hectoring Bill about where he and Chelsea will sleep ("You could have the room where I first violated Ethel"). As for Billy, he is wary, always ready to sulk or run. But there are possibilities in the situation. It could break Norman's habit of turning ever more tightly in on himself, and teach Billy his conviction that no one is interested in him is wrong. If an old man starts to show a young man the ropes (or at least how to handle a fishing line), perhaps Norman will see he still has useful work to perform as a teacher. Perhaps Billy will see that even if affection is crankily stated, it is still affection, and that he is worthy of it.
The psychology may be taken a little too straight out of Erik Erikson, or even Gail Sheehy, and the plot verges on the melodramatic (it takes a boating accident to seal the bargain of friendship between the generations). But emotionally On Golden Pond is no less valid for being something of a cliche. Anyway, the characters are so strong that the piece does not play as a cliché. Hepburn, for example may have a less chewy part than has Fonda, but the briskness of her manner, her well-justified image as a no-nonsense individualist who is nevertheless a good sport, serve her wonderfully. There is a vivifying touch of tension between an actress who was a liberated woman before the movement was born and her role as traditional wife and mother.
But Golden Pond finally belongs to Henry Fonda, who has had to wait until the end of his life for the part of his life. As Norman he is able to bring together, in a single character, the two main strands of his talent. The old gentleman's character is grounded on the main line of Fonda's star career. The fundamental decency and intelligence that were basic to the likes of Tom load and Mr. Roberts still infuse his presence.
Indeed, so powerful has that image been that one sometimes forgets how splendid he has been as a character actor. The military martinet of Fort Apache, the cold-eyed outlaw of Once Upon a Time in the West, even the hilariously befuddled herpetologist "Hopsy" Pike of The Lady Eve—they all light up in one's memory as the spirit that animated them flashes in Fonda's eyes. Without raising his voice he gives a bravura performance as he moves from depressed withdrawal to momentary rages, from the struggle to express affection to the struggle not to express it, lest it be mistaken for weakness.