The Leisure Seeker (2017): A Road Trip and a Diagnosis

Ella and John Spencer, an elderly Massachusetts couple, slip away from their doctors and their two grown children in the battered camper van they christened the Leisure Seeker, driving down the old coastal route toward Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West. John is a retired English teacher whose dementia is well advanced, while Ella, wigged and in pain, is concealing how little time she has. The trip is punctuated by their children's frantic phone calls, a roadside robbery, and a detour to a nursing home where a secret reframes the marriage. When John wanders off at a Hemingway tourist site he ends up in a hospital, where a doctor, mistaking the moment for a consultation, tells him that the cancer that began in Ella's colon has now spread throughout her body. Ella refuses admission and they finish the drive to Key West. Rather than face a hospital for herself and institutional care for John, she arranges their deaths together in the camper, leaving a letter telling their children that the relief they will feel is nothing to be ashamed of.

Spoilers throughout. Discussing the cancer storyline means discussing how this ends.

The film's real subject is the arithmetic two old people do when both of them are failing in different directions, and it is honest that Ella's decision is driven as much by the impossibility of leaving John behind as by her own prognosis. The concealment is well drawn — the wig, the pills managed out of sight, the vomiting explained away — and so is the way she keeps performing competence for a husband who mostly cannot notice. The children's phone calls, oscillating between panic, guilt and threats, are the most recognisable thing in the film. Ella's letter, which anticipates that her children will feel relieved and tells them in advance not to feel guilty, names something families rarely say aloud.

Ella is depicted as being close to death yet still driving a large vehicle across the eastern seaboard, managing her husband's wandering and hosting a roadside picnic. The ending is a deliberate act of authorship rather than a depiction of dying, and it presents a jointly chosen death as serene, tidy and unambiguously loving, with none of the questions that a decision made on behalf of a spouse with advanced dementia would actually raise.

The colon origin is named exactly once, in a hospital scene staged as overheard through John's confusion. Essentially all press coverage — including major reviews — describes Ella's illness only as "terminal cancer", with no site at all, and at least one outlet that does mention colon cancer attaches it to the wrong spouse.

The consultation scene is also the film's weakest moment on its own terms, and not only because a doctor delivers a full staging summary to a man in visible cognitive crisis who is not the patient. The line itself says the disease has undergone "blood-borne spread through the lymphatic system". Those are two different routes, and the sentence collapses them into one.

That is worth recording precisely: it is a flaw in the script, not a garbled transcript. The film really does say it.

Since the film muddles this, here is the plain version.

Cancer spreads in a few distinct ways, and they are usually described separately because they mean different things:

• Locally, by growing into the tissue immediately around it.
• Through the lymphatic system, travelling in lymph fluid to nearby lymph nodes — which is why nodes are checked and why finding cancer in them changes the stage.
• Through the bloodstream, travelling to distant organs such as the liver, lungs, bones or brain.

"Blood-borne spread through the lymphatic system" collapses the second and third into a single phrase, which is why it reads as wrong to anyone who works with this. Metastatic cancer sets out how the process is actually described — including the rule the film does get right by implication, that a cancer keeps the name of where it started. Ella's disease is colorectal cancer wherever else it has reached.

The other thing missing from the film is any support at all. A woman in Ella's position would ordinarily have palliative care involved for pain and symptom control — the thing she is managing alone out of a handbag for the entire journey.

A film is not a diagnosis, and a dramatised illness is not a guide to your own. What a story like this is genuinely good for is lowering the barrier to a conversation you might otherwise put off.

If something in your body has changed and stayed changed for a few weeks, that is worth raising with a doctor — not because it is likely to be cancer, but because most of the time it will not be, and finding that out is the point. Where screening exists for a cancer, it is the only thing on the list you can do before anything is wrong at all. See screening and possible warning signs.

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The Leisure Seeker is a road movie about two people running out of road, and its one medical scene manages to be both the source of its diagnosis and its worst piece of writing. Spread through the blood and spread through the lymph are not the same thing.

This page describes a work of film or television for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email [email protected].