Book Club ** (2018, Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Mary Steenburgen, Andy Garcia, Don Johnson) – Movie Review

It’s sweet to spend nice time with these clever veteran movie icon survivors, and Book Club should keep their many fans happy.

Ah, yes, an evening with Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen. Excellent!

It’s sweet to spend nice time with these clever veteran movie icon survivors, and the cheeky but harmless older person chick-flick Book Club should keep their many female fans happy. They are a likeable, hard-working bunch of actresses, and they do perform well and establish their mutual chemistry.

They persuade you they are really lifelong friends, even if they might never have worked together before or even met each other previously. It’s called acting, and they are good at it.

There is a lack of films about older women and sex, and this does try to fill the gap. Actually there probably is a lack of films about older women, full stop.

Alas, however, the script by director Bill Holderman and Erin Simms is rheumaticky cheesy, predictable and uninspired. Of course you wish the actresses a better script, but great comedy scripts are near impossible to find apparently. Men may find it a long, gruelling 104 minutes, maybe not.

The quartet play long-term friends, now older women, who have a monthly book club, oddly enough, choosing a work of fiction, reading it, and then meeting up to discuss it, I guess. Ms Fonda suggests they are not past it yet and need spicing up in the love life department with inspiration from Fifty Shades of Gray and its sequels. The others protest, but then get into the gray spirit.

Keaton meets up with new pal, airline pilot Andy Garcia, Fonda re-meets old flame Don Johnson. Both stories follow the same flight path. Steenburgen needs to spice up her marriage to loving but boring old Craig T Nelson. But how? Bergen plays a high court judge, of all things, who gets on line and starts picking out men to meet – and old Richard Dreyfuss and old Wallace Shawn promptly turn up. 

Garcia’s thing with Keaton goes best. Garcia’s got kind of tubby and grizzled, but, boy, he’s a real smooth charmer. Why, oh why is Keaton pushing him away? It makes no sense! Ditto Fonda and Johnson in the pushing him away and real charmer departments. Perhaps the most amusing performance, though, comes from Bergen. Funny, that!

The film, of course, like its characters, has no interest in books whatever. Fifty Shades of Gray is just accessed for some smutty jokes and its supposed sex appeal. A film called Book Club could have liked books a bit more. That would have been novel.

Keaton gets top billing, surprisingly, over Fonda.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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