A movie about the sex lives of adults should have been smarter than Book Club
In Book Club, we are given a brainless, toothless, sexually inhibited and largely unfunny comedy centered around fan fiction inspired by a series of YA books and movies about vampires. American culture is rich indeed.
The picture stars four old-ish but still remarkably put-together, successful women who have for many years maintained a friendship bolstered by their monthly book club. The women are Diane (Diane Keaton), a recent widow with two cartoonishly overbearing daughters; Vivian (Jane Fonda), your classic “Sex-and-the-City” Samantha character — oversexed and inexplicably terrified of feelings; Sharon (Candice Bergen), a frigid, divorced federal judge who hasn’t had sex in 18 years; and Carol (Mary Steenburgen), happily married except that her husband is barely conscious and hates sex. These women are in for a pretty big life shakeup, thanks to Vivian’s outrageous suggestion that the group starts reading the purple, lurid prose from Fifty Shades of Grey. My heavens, I never, oh my, etcetera.
If you’re picturing a montage of each woman turning pages excitedly in various locations with their mouths agape, that’s accurate. Before long, each finds herself on a different movie trajectory of sexual awakening. Diane is torn between storybook sexual advances from a rich pilot (Andy Garcia) and her shrill, terrible daughters in Arizona (Alicia Silverstone and Katie Aselton), who spend the entire picture with a mirror under their mother’s nostrils, practically begging her to just die already. (Not literally: that would be a funny gag and this movie has none.) Will she finally stand up to her daughters and allow herself to be happy?
Carol has a plastic figure, owns her own hotel and spends the whole movie shunning the advances of an old flame (Don Johnson) for no reason. I’m aware the conventions of the genre are replete with fake problems, but this one’s particularly obscene.
Sharon’s obsessed with her ex-husband (Ed Begley Jr.), who we see on social media in inexcusably terrible PhotoShopped photos with his young, beautiful fiancée in Maui or some other made-up place. Seriously, why are these comedies featuring great aging actors centered around Metamucil jokes always so lazily rendered? It’s insulting to its target demographic, as if they’re too old and dumb to care whether art catered to them is good or not. Anyway, Sharon starts dating Richard Dreyfuss through Bumble.
Carol’s issues with her husband are the most plausible of the lot, but no less boring: Her husband (Craig T. Nelson) seems to have lost all will to live since retiring; their intimacy is gone and they don’t know how to communicate with one another. Will this plotline culminate in a dance number?
I saw Book Club at an advance screening on Mother’s Day with enthusiastic promoters who brought a fun photo booth and flowers for everyone (I narrowly dodged being handed a carnation — I’m a cranky film critic, I hate flowers!). The people who were not me seemed to enjoy the movie a lot, which is designed to soothe an already tame audience with fantasies of a rich life in their golden years. It’s fine to like a movie, and I feel a little bad tearing this one down so viciously, but it’s my duty to warn you against a story so clichéd and lazy that it may actually make you stupider. I actually kind of like the Fifty Shades movies (in a detached, elitist way) and thus had hopes that Book Club might have some fun with BDSM. Show me Murphy Brown tied to something! But no; they’re blushing all the way through this PG-13, fully-buttoned slog. Unless you really like double entendres, I would stay away.