Blow Up

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2015) was recommended to us by word of mouth. It sounds like one of those heartwarming old-people stories, but my sister told me it was much more. For one thing, the old man mostly liked blowing things up.

The 100-year-old man is Robert Gustafsson, an inmate of a Swedish old age home. It is is 100th birthday, and he is fed up. He slips out the window (don’t worry, he’s on the ground floor) and heads for the bus station. He only has enough money to go to a little nowhere town, but a rude skinhead demands that he watch his bag, so he takes that onto the bus with him. The bag contains a large amount of cash, because the skinhead is part of a criminal organization.

At the nowhere town, Gustafsson meets up with a retired guy and they get drunk together and decide to head out together and share the money. They may realize that the crooks are after them - they accidentally kill one - but probably don’t know that the police are looking for the vanished old man as well.

Mixed in with this is the story of the Gustafsson’s life. His father was a bit of a crackpot who went to Russia to promote birth control. When he was killed there, his son accidentally (maybe) blew up their landlord, and was sent to a sanitarium. Throughout his life, he fought in wars, starting with the Spanish Civil War, because he loves blowing things up. He saves the life of Franco, visits Stalin (gets sent to the gulag when he mentions Franco), and eventually gets a job with the Manhattan project. So possibly a better title would be The 100-Year-Old Man Who Loved to Blow Things Up.

Things get quite out of hand, and it is all rather drily humorous. The most surprising thing, I thought, is that the old man’s wisdom was almost non-existent. Actually, he was kind of an idiot. But he was lucky, and blowing things up is a useful skill, it turns out.