Mark Reviews Movies: BOOK CLUB

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 18, 2018

Director Bill Holderman and Erin Simms' screenplay for Book Club feels like a half-manufactured machine. The setup features a group of women of a certain age who have had a monthly book club for the past 40 years. Each of the characters has been written in such a way that someone in the movie might feel like a reflection of its audience. There's the long-married one, and there's the widow. There's a divorced character, and there's a woman who has never felt the need for a long-term relationship. All of them decide to look for a new kind of love.

Each one, naturally, will try to rekindle the flame of passion in their lives, so they each get a romantic partner or, in the case of one of the women, two. Having checked all of the boxes of marital status and having provided a basic outline for a story, the screenwriters appear to have stopped. They've provided the setup and, apparently, hoped that everything else simply would fall into place from there.

To be fair, there are comic setups here, as the women go about finding ways to strengthen their individual love lives, but the jokes are either so familiar or so anticlimactic that they might as well be absent. There's a gag in which the overprotective daughters of one of the characters storm in on their mother with her secret boyfriend, and there's the 20-years-tired joke in which a man has to go about his business with a pharmaceutically induced erection. Doesn't it feel like 15 years after the time that particular joke should have been retired?

The four women are Diane (Diane Keaton), Vivian (Jane Fonda), Sharon (Candice Bergen), and Carol (Mary Steenburgen). A brief prologue, featuring modified photographs of various levels of incompetence, gives us the minimal information we need to know about them.

Diane was married to an accountant, who died about year prior. Forty years ago, Vivian was once in love with a man, but when he proposed to her, she declined. He left town, and the two haven't seen or spoken to each other since. Now, she owns a couple of hotels. Sharon is a federal judge, and her husband Tom (Ed Begley Jr.) divorced her about two decades ago. She hasn't been on a date since then. Carol is married to Bruce (Craig T. Nelson), the man of her dreams, and is the head chef at a restaurant that she owns.

With the introductions to these women as individuals quickly out of the way, the rest of the movie defines them by their respective relationships with men. On a plane to visit her daughters, Diane meets a commercial airline pilot named Mitchell (Andy Garcia) when she falls on top of him getting to her seat and unintentionally grabs his crotch when she's startled by a loud noise. Arthur (Don Johnson) returns to Vivian's life after a 40-year absence, leaving her conflicted by her lifelong independence and the return of the good, old feelings she has for him.

After learning her ex has become engaged to a younger woman, Sharon joins an online dating website and gets along fine with George (Richard Dreyfuss). Carol is frustrated that Bruce no longer seems interested in sex, so she tries to fix that.

The impetus for these changes comes from reading E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey, with its allegedly erotic depictions of sex, for the book club. One wonders which came first: the movie's own story or the idea of incorporating a popular book to draw attention. It's difficult to tell. The characters and their stories are half-baked enough that the content of the movie often feels like an afterthought. As a way to promote the book, the movie is far too polite in terms of its own relationship with sex: It's never shown and always spoken of in strained metaphors, civil euphemisms, or accidental double entendres.

The movie coasts on the appeal of its actors and their rapport. The four leads try, although they don't have much with which to work. Keaton and Garcia have some sweet moments, but the other relationships on display here feel hastily developed or cramped by the movie's constant switching between the characters.

Mostly, though, the movie is lazy in its development of these characters, its generic thoughts on love after a certain age, and its attempts to create some screwball comedy. Book Club comes across as the basic concept of a movie, stretched out until the machinations of every character, story development, and joke are transparent.

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