BOOK CLUB (Bill Holderman). 104 minutes. Opens Friday (May 18). See listing. Rating: NN
Screen roles for actors of a certain age are limited, especially for women. The fluffy comedy Book Club responds to that by giving icons like Jane Fonda and Diane Keaton an opportunity… but an opportunity for what?
In a story about women rediscovering romance after reading Fifty Shades Of Grey, Fonda, Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen get to hang about in living rooms right out of Town & Country magazine, drinking wine and discussing cute but hardly risqué forays into dating and sex.
Despite Christian Grey’s influence, we don’t get to see Fonda or Bergen play with anal beads, perhaps because such a raunchy spectacle would be too impolite for what Book Club has in mind. The movie deems sex after 60 sufficiently exciting.
The intended audience will rightfully soak up the time spent with such high-calibre performers as they randomly point to all the ways culture counts them out. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to cracking a few smiles just watching them. But every sassy shrug from Fonda or gloriously sarcastic burn from Bergen comes with a pang, a realization that everybody involved (the cast and their audience) are simply making do.
The cast is picking up scraps from a screenplay that feels tossed off and left half-finished. They are jumping at an opportunity to play characters who proudly resist being put out to pasture in a movie that feels like Hollywood is just trying to give them something to keep busy.
