BOOK CLUB

Women are flocking to "Book Club", a movie starring legends Jane Fonda (81), Diane Keaton (72), Candace Bergen (72), and Mary Steenburgen (65) who in the show play friends who have been in a book club together for 40 years.   They are all financially secure, professional women who have made peace with their lives, settled, but not excited about where they find themselves.  To enliven their lives and their book club selection, the Fonda character shows up one night with copies of "50 Shades of Grey".  And on it goes....

I really wanted to see this movie because the ads on TV made me laugh out loud and I love every one of those actresses.  Plus, what a great girlfriend movie!  I went with one of my dearest, oldest friends and we had a blast.

My expectations were for a funny, light-hearted rom-com and that's pretty much what it was.  Could the topic have been explored with more depth and seriousness?  Yes.  I would like to see a movie do that.  But that wasn't what this one was setting out to do, so I was fine with it being silly at times, unrealistic in some ways, and totally predictable.

One of the things I was dreading about the movie was what I assumed would be a constant barrage of age-related (ageist) humor.  There was a bit of it, but it didn't offend me the way I can often be offended by ageism stereotypes.  At the very beginning I was put off by the "at our age!" jokes that took aim at sexuality in older people as an absurd notion, but the movie quickly moved on from there.  There was also a scene where the Keaton character is left in a mall sitting area with a group of older people who are variously vacant, mobility-challenged, or mouth-agape asleep....and she obviously laments being lumped in with "the old people", fighting her daughters' attempts to pigeonhole her into senility.  Seeing older folks portrayed such was an offensive shortcut way of differentiating her from them as in "I ain't old yet!"  But my friend and I agreed that the ageism trope was thankfully mostly left out of this.

I wrote about the 50 Shades book back when it came out too and wondered how it would be incorporated into this movie.  I was disgusted at how coercing a young virgin into S&M sexual exploration, and the way Grey "dominates" Ana outside the Red Room as well, was seen as a "love story" and there is a line in Book Club where Steenburgen says that "even Christian Grey" needed love.  No.  There's really no love in those books.  But most offensive was the writing in that book.  I wanted to shout out a Safe Word every time the overuse of cliches and the mangling of writing conventions was flouted.  I digress.

Book Club ended with each of the women getting a new perspective on their lives by reading a racy book that challenged them to think beyond what they had settled for and at one point challenging each other to get out of their comfort zone and DO SOMETHING!  Old flames (Don Johnson), new acquaintances (Andy Garcia), dating site risks (Richard Dryfuss), and a reawakened husband (Craig T. Nelson) led to what we presume to be a happy ending for all.

I just know that I enjoyed a couple of hours watching great actors, owning their ages,  playing characters with fabulous houses and witty dialog, each being her own woman, willing to learn, take risks, and keep living, loving, and laughing with life -- a hopeful, funny, human movie full of adults.

Good enough for me at a Tuesday matinee.

At least, that's the view from here...©