BOOK CLUB 2018
54%
Directed by Bill Holderman
Written by Erin Simms and Bill Holderman
Starring Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Mary Steenburgen
Synopsis
Four lifelong friends look to spice up their lives and select the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey for their book club. As they finally begin opening up about their hopes and fears, the women individually take giant leaps to achieve happiness.
Why We Love It
The four actresses who headline this movie don’t immediately scream “big box office” to studio execs, which is why they work less frequently than their younger twenty-something analogs in the industry. (Except Mary Steenburgen, because, well, she’s in everything.) Watching Book Club only underscores how deprived audiences have been of their talents.
With a so-so script played out on overly lit sets that only wish they could be Nancy Meyers’s kitchens, Book Club is a breezy two hours of women talking, laughing and drinking so much white wine. A good chunk of the movie’s considerable box office came from women thirty-five years and up: the older of the crowd wanted to see their lives reflected back to them, and the younger of the crowd wanted reassurance that love and fun doesn’t end at some predestined date. Book Club, in its simple message that older women are people too, is life affirming.
Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, and Steenburgen all took their roles for less money and frills than any of them are worth—or used to—
specifically so they could work together and commit to film a story about aging women and their evolving attitudes towards sex and love. Their camaraderie in Book Club comes off as authentic and spontaneous, as though Fonda just happened to call up her old buds for a wine-and-bitch session. Nobody’s playing against type here: Fonda’s a feisty, powerful, vain version of herself, and Bergen’s performance could have been ripped from the reboot of Murphy Brown. But that’s also the appeal—after so many years of playing characters, now they’re just playing themselves.
And while critics mostly shrugged, there were those who recognized the film as the simple pleasure—and the small surprise—that it is. The Atlantic’s David Sims wrote that despite the “green-screened view of a romantic sunset that looks like stock footage from a karaoke video” here and there, the film is “a delightfully tacky summer romp that feels destined to become a classic in basic cable reruns.” And Leah Greenblatt at Entertainment Weekly called Book Club “some kind of small Hollywood miracle” for letting older women “live” on-screen.
The movie’s writer, Erin Simms, says executives asked her to make the characters younger, which she called a “non-starter.” Based on real conversations and events she had with the older women in her life, she took a chance bringing this story to the screen, and with a box office ten times the budget, the film proves that even the mundanity of older women’s lives is bankable with the right actors in place.