Fine actresses at the mercy of banal writing
Book Club 12A cert, 104 min
Dir Bill Holderman Starring Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Mary Steenburgen, Andy Garcia, Craig T Nelson, Don Johnson, Richard Dreyfuss, Wallace Shawn, Alicia Silverstone
The four formidable actresses in Book Club – Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen – certainly know their way around a library. Over 50-odd years on screen they’ve tackled everything from Ibsen to The Godfather, Sondheim to Jonathan Swift.
It’s with eye-widening despair, then, that the realisation dawns: the books they’re going to read in Book Club are Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels.
Fonda’s Vivian, the tireless sexpot of the crew, whips out copies of EL James’s first opus at one of their regular meetings, to various shades of mock horror from the other three. Bergen’s Carol, an uptight, long-divorced judge, is the most appalled. Steenburgen’s Mary, alone among them, is still married, but her bedroom sure could do with a Red-room-of-pain-style shake-up. And Keaton’s Diane, the breezy narrator, laughs it all off as embarrassing tat, but then gets swiftly stuck in during a long-haul flight, with Andy Garcia right next to her as a highly eligible potential fling.
Any arching of film buff eyebrows – erm, Keaton’s now dating her daughter’s psychotic beau from The Godfather Part III, is she? – will be accompanied by chronic slack-jaw from the banality of the writing. It’s clear to what model director Bill Holderman (co-credited as screenwriter with Erin Simms) cleaved when they were cooking up the dynamics between these four – and it wasn’t the Mitford sisters’ letters. It was Sex and the City, which it apes like there’s no tomorrow.
Vivian, especially, is so Samanthaesque that Fonda is put in the obligatory position of doing a leopardprint-leotards-at-the-ready Kim Cattrall routine. Whatever fabulous nick she’s in, that can’t be what anyone was waiting for. The men are all ridiculously wealthy, only slightly paunchy dreamboats with golden-girl-shaped holes in their semi-retirement. Silver surfers are a click away on the dating app Bumble for the depressed Bergen, who lines up dates with Richard Dreyfuss and Wallace Shawn while keeping her court in recess.
The only actors with chemistry are a glowing Steenburgen and Craig T Nelson, as the tired husband gagging to have Viagra slipped in his whisky. Otherwise, except for one good, oddly rogue joke about a Werner Herzog documentary, there’s almost nothing to be said for this mouldy old script.
Frustratingly, there’s a great deal of romantic-comic potential in the love lives of over-60s, as Meryl Streep has proved in some of her sunnier vehicles – Hope Springs, say. But this film manages to assemble a virtual Infinity War of Streep’s spikiest Hollywood contemporaries – inspired comedians right down the batting order – and barely even passes the Bechdel Test.