Book Club

The trouble with Book Club is that there really isn’t any book club. At all.

Our four heroines meet regularly to discuss a book — but they don’t. The only sessions we see are about the sequential secretions of 50 Shades of Grey. Even then, there are no discussions of idea, theme, style, anything literary. You know: book club stuff. 

Instead the “book club” sessions serve only as an excuse to launch the women’s respective sexual reawakenings. 

Understand, I’m all for 70-plus-year-olds having sex. Present company especially. I’m all for parents outgrowing their adult dependents and even addressing and amending old neuroses. 

I’m glad to see Jane Fonda, Candace Bergen, Mary Steenburgen and Diane Keaton dug out of mothballs and deployed against the industry’s obsession with youth. 

As for the men, Richard Dreyfuss, Don Johnson, Andy Garcia, all are welcome resurrections of our role models of yore — and Craig Nelson our more realistic reflection. It’s even gratifying to see Wallace Shawn revive the Fallback Homunculus role he’s played since Annie Hall. 

But why do all these mature women have to be reharnessed to the tired tread of sexual comedy? Why does a federal judge (Bergen) have to be reduced to bawdy embarrassment?  These actors and their characters are grown up now, so can’t they be characterized by their intelligence and  — dare one say? — ideas instead of assigned their old sex roles? 

Still, it’s a very funny movie. Wit abounds and the leads’ predicaments can be intermittently engaging. 
      But if you’re bringing back such intelligent, capable performers give them some meat, Leave the floss for their lessers. The young ones who haven't seen enough to do more.