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‘Book Club’: Exceptional Stars
by Sandra Olmsted
In Book Club, co-writer and first-time director Bill Holderman and co-writer Erin Simms capitalize on the popularity of The Shades of Grey novels while exploring the lives of four aging, vibrant women. Bubbly humor flows through the film like the bubbly drank by stars of the film: Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen. These four actresses, who have great chops and the veteran actors playing their love interests deliver stellar performances.
In the prolong, four young women, who probably read Nine 1/2 Weeks, had just graduated college, and they started a book club in order to stay connected just as their lives began to pull them in different directions. Decades later, will their major life changes, epitomizing the typical problems older women face, finally pull them and their beloved book club apart?
Just as the widowed Diane (played by Keaton) succumbs to her nagging, over-protective daughters’ (Alicia Silverstone and Katie Aselton) demands that she move to Arizona and live in a basement “apartment,” she meets Mitchell (Andy García), a romantic airline pilot. Meanwhile, Vivian (Fonda) must contend with the one she loved and lost, Arthur (Don Johnson), reappearing in her life. For Vivian, love is an
tithetical to her life spent becoming a wealthy, powerful hotel owner and embracing casual sex.
At the same time, Carol (Steenburgen) can’t understand why her husband, Bruce (Craig T. Nelson) seems to be avoiding sex, which they had always enjoyed along with other activities he is also avoiding. Finally, the long-divorced Sharon (Bergen channeling Murphy Brown) gave up on love and her marriage twenty-some years ago. After her ex-husband (Ed Begley, Jr.) gets engaged, Sharon, a federal judge, decides to venture into online dating, resulting in embarrassing problems and rival beaus (Richard Dreyfuss, Wallace Shawn).
While not actually including handcuffs, whips, or much Viagra, the women’s erotic and/or romantic awakenings or re-awakenings reveal some deeper truths about the rich lives possible for older women and men. The humor, such as Carol referring to her husband’s lack of interest in sex and a part of her own body as Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” epitomizes the quippy one-liners throughout the movie. However, the humor, although delightful, is often a little too on the nose rather than illuminating the underlying issues.
Furthermore, the characters seem dated as though the women in the book club should have been reading Ingeborg Day’s Nine 1/2 Weeks (1978) in the 1980s rather than The Shades of Grey trilogy. The characters’ motivations are sometimes trite and offer few insights into the way women age and live today, yet these would have been amazingly insightful some years ago. Still, I can recommend Book Club, a Paramount Pictures release, as purely escapist humor for a summer outing. Rated PG-13 for sex-related material throughout, and for language and running 104 minutes, Book Club is in theaters now.
