Mark Reviews Movies: POMS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 10, 2019

There is no offense intended to the cast of Poms, who try to bring some life to this wholly predictable and incredibly dull material, but at some point, the actors had to have read the script, right? The difficulty for actors—and especially for women—to find good, worthwhile roles after reaching a certain age is widely known and often discussed by performers themselves. Even with this in mind, there must be a limit to what roles an actor will endure for a paycheck, as well as to stay in eyes of the public and the industry.

Whatever these actors made for this one, the salary is richly deserved. They probably deserved much more. It's embarrassing, not only because the movie turns these characters—all of them older women—into a joke, but also because it's not even funny. The premise is that a group of retirees in a planned community decide to start a cheerleading club, and the joke is that, well, they're too old to be taken seriously as anything more than a sideshow act.

There's also a rather depressing undercurrent to this embarrassment. Even after reading the screenplay, all of these actors decided to accept these roles. Some of them, particularly the ones whose names and faces aren't as well-known as the more famous ones, probably had to go through the grueling process of auditioning for a part in this thing.

Is it really that desperate out there for actresses who have reached a certain age? One hopes that some filmmakers out there will witness this movie and realize that there are working actresses who can put their all into something as lifeless as this. Hopefully, some of those filmmakers will be people with the drive and the means to set out to make material worthy of such recognizable and hidden talent. In a year or two from now, we'll see these actors together or separately in other movies, with richly drawn characters and stories that examine the lives of those women as something much more than a punch line. A critic can dream.

The temptation to dream—either while awake or asleep—is strong while watching this movie. It centers on Martha (Diane Keaton, who once again proves that she can't help but be charming), a single woman who, at the start, is selling off most of the belongings she has in the apartment where she has lived for almost 50 years. She's moving to a retirement community in Georgia, after deciding that she won't be receiving treatment for cancer. This decision makes no sense in the context of the movie, since she's miserable from the moment she arrives and has no interest in making any friends.

Without the move, though, there wouldn't be an easily accessible collection of women her age or older to assemble for a plot. Her neighbor Sheryl (Jacki Weaver), the requisite character who talks about sex a lot, wants Martha to enjoy herself. The mention of a failed attempt to become a cheerleader as a teenager suddenly (after first thinking it's a terrible, impractical idea) has Martha excited to start a cheerleading club in the community.

The movie features six other characters for the club, although Shane Atkinson's screenplay only gives three of them any sort of personality. Alice (Rhea Perlman) is the wife of a controlling husband, who mysteriously dies shortly after he says she can't join the club. Olive (Pam Grier) is married and once took a tango class, and Helen (Phyllis Somerville) has an overbearing son (played by David Maldonado) who doesn't want his mother participating.

What more can be said of this story? The women are bad at first and embarrass themselves at a high school pep rally, before a video of their performance spreads online. There's a big cheerleading competition soon, and Martha wants one, final shot at some kind of glory. There are plenty of montages, showing the group being awkward and then getting better with the help of teenage cheerleader Chloe (Alisha Boe), and jokes that fall flat, because none of these characters have internal or external lives that mean anything beyond being the joke of older women trying to be cheerleaders. There's even a villainous head (played by Celia Weston) of the community, who tries to put a stop to the club.

All of it, of course, is supposed to inspirational, in that these women still have some life in them. Technically, that's true, which is more than can be said for Poms.

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