50 shades of Gran!
A top cast, but the jokes need Viagra as Jane Fonda and pals spice up their sex lives
Book Club (12A) Verdict: Not very novel
WHEN E.L. James first sat down to write Fifty Shades Of Grey, not even her wildest fantasies — and we know just how wild they were — could have stretched to her saucy trilogy spawning three movie adaptations and then a film in which Jane Fonda brandishes her works of erotica at Diane Keaton.
Yet that’s what happens in Book Club. Four women in their twilight years (the other two are played by Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen) have their own wilting sex lives reinvigorated by reading about the lustful adventures of Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele.
It sounds like fun, and possibly would be, were it not for a screenplay that appears to have been written by a sixth-former with a bit of help from his game old grandma.
An extended series of innuendo-sodden gags about a faithful motorbike is enough to awaken the ghosts of Sid James and Frankie Howerd.
And then, scarcely have you stopped marvelling that someone could suggestively use the word ‘crankshaft’ in a mainstream Hollywood movie, there follows an even more laboured mini-farce involving a sex- starved wife slyly slipping her husband, who has a libido not so much flagging as well and truly flagged, a dose of Viagra.
That’s not to say there aren’t some pleasures to be found in seeing this quartet of ageing stars bouncing off one another. After all, before the sordid Harvey Weinstein affair changed the battle cry for women in Hollywood, their loudest grievance was that there were hardly any vehicles for older actresses.
Here’s one for four of the classiest of them, so that’s worth celebrating. But as vehicles go, it’s a Lamborghini with a Lada engine.
The four women, whose monthly LA book club has been meeting for 30 years, are Vivian (Fonda), Diane (Keaton), Sharon (Bergen) and Carol (Steenburgen).
Naturally, to service the clunky narrative, they find themselves in very different places on the man front.
Vivian, a hotel magnate, is a lifelong commitment-phobe; Diane is recently widowed and under pressure from her two daughters to live near them in Arizona; Sharon, a federal judge, hasn’t had sex since her long-ago divorce ‘and it’s been the happiest 18 years of my life’; Carol is happily married, or thinks she is, until it occurs to her that her husband Bruce (Craig T. Nelson) appears to have mislaid his vigour.
If only he would remove her clothes with as much zest as he whips the tarpaulin off his old motorbike.
They approach the Fifty Shades trilogy with varying levels of enthusiasm. Vivian grasps the first book energetically; Sharon picks it up with great care and studied distaste, as if it were a full nappy.
Then they start reading, and the plot’s fundamental paradox begins to take shape: here are four robust, mature, modern women — who live in LA, for heaven’s sake — yet respond to accounts of kinky sex like virginal novitiates, all but clasping their hands to their mouths and crying ‘oh my!’ as Christian introduces Anastasia to his ‘Red Room Of Pain’.
DIRECTORBill Holderman and cowriter Erin Simms never overcome this problem, and don’t seem to worry about other glaring inconsistencies, of which my favourite is that Diane’s married daughters treat her like a fragile geriatric.
One even says: ‘ You could slip and fall at any moment.’ To reiterate, Diane is played by the lovely Diane Keaton, not the late Thora Hird.
Still, the clues are there in the opening titles. Holderman and Simms worked together on the lame 2015 comedy-drama A Walk In The Woods, which pulled off the almost impossible doublewhammy of making Bill Bryson’s source material feel dull and Robert Redford look ridiculous.
They don’t seem to know, or really care, how older people tick.
On the other hand, the filmmakers have assembled a terrific cast, who make Book Club worth seeing, just about.
And it’s not only the four leads who sparkle. Vivian is wooed by an old boyfriend played by Don Johnson (a little in-joke, no doubt, given that his daughter Dakota Johnson bared all in the Fifty Shades films), while Sharon goes online to look for male companionship, and appears to find it in the short, tubby form of Richard Dreyfuss, here playing a twinkly- eyed tax attorney and still a boon to romantic comedy 40 years after The Goodbye Girl.
As for Diane, she confounds her daughters’ view of her as very nearly fossilised by responding to the insistent overtures of a genially dishy bloke she meets on a plane, nicely played by Andy Garcia.
Incidentally, it will not escape your notice during Book Club that the standard Hollywood age gap is inverted by these pairings.
At 62, Garcia is 10 years younger than Keaton, while Johnson is a stripling of 68 alongside Fonda, who might be fighting a winning battle with the tides of time by not looking like anyone’s idea of an octogenarian, but is, nonetheless.
This is another welcome counterblast to all those movies in which liver-spotted codgers get to shack up with women half their age, but ultimately, Book Club is about as non-conformist as a whist drive.
For every rom-com convention it challenges, there are lots more it dispiritingly obeys, not least the inflexible rule that all the characters should inhabit a middle-class world of extreme affluence, in which angst about sex and relationships are all very well, but concerns about money are firmly taboo.