Is ‘Book Club’ the biggest waste of talent ever?
There may be bigger wastes of talent than that gathered for “Book Club,” but none spring immediately to mind.
How do you assemble a cast that includes Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen and still come up with such an awful movie? These are terrific actresses, with four Oscars between them. Only Bergen hasn’t won , though she’s been nominated — maybe her five Emmys soften the blow.
These supremely talented women are put through embarrassing paces by director and co-writer Bill Holderman.
It’s meant to be a film about a reawakening of desire, and thus life. It turns out to be a wince-inducing mess.
Diane (Keaton), Vivian (Fonda), Sharon (Bergen) and Carol (Steenbur-
gen) are old friends. Each, in their way, has lost her spark, whether it be idiotically overprotective children, a husband not interested in sex, bitterness over divorce or the emptiness left by the shallow pursuit of wealth at the expense of all else.
Yeah, that last is Vivian, a role Fonda seems particularly comfortable with.
As the title suggests — as obviously as everything else going on here — the women have a book club. Like many of these gatherings, it’s an excuse to read a book and get together and talk about it, and drink a lot of wine and dish on each other’s lives.
One day Vivian, who boasts of her sex-without-feelings exploits pretty much all the time, brings “Fifty Shades of Grey” for the month’s selection.
My word, have you ever seen such language, such description of such sordid sexual acts? The are shocked,
shocked I tell you. Certainly that’s the general reaction, which is dispiriting when you remember that the majority of these women played a part in the cultural awakening — which included, yes, sex — in the 1960s and ’70s.
Over time, however, the book ignites that missing spark. Diane tentatively dates a pilot (Andy Garcia), not daring to tell her dopey daughters, who evidently believe she is 4 years old. Carol tries, in fits and starts, to jazz up her love life with her husband (Craig T. Nelson, who has the distinction of walking around sporting one of the side effects of Viagra they warn you about in the TV commercials). Sharon joins an online dating service and finds Richard Dreyfuss (throw another Oscar on the fire). And Vivian rekindles a relationship with old flame Arthur (Don Johnson).
Look, I know, this film is aimed at a specific audience, which I’m not part of. I know because I sat with members of the target demographic — women the age of the cast — during a screening, and they loved it. “Book Club,” if nothing else, does at least allow older women to be represented on the screen in roles other than doddering grandparents or senile widows or whatever. Each of these women is, in her own way, still full of life and vitality, even if it takes an awful book to remind them. Points for that.
But it would be nice if, like women of any age in real life, these characters weren’t presented as ridiculous cartoons, almost parodies of women struggling to figure out their lives as they get older and things change. Sure, it’s a comedy, but the humor in “Book Club” is intentionally so broad that it leaves no marks. Which means there are no stakes. There’s never any question what will happen with any of the characters, ever. It’s a vapid fairy tale, albeit it one with a gold-plated cast. Too bad they’re stuck in cardboard surroundings.