Book Club: The Next Chapter
Four women take on Italy, and each other’s problems, in this comedy.
Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen contemplate the next chapter in the Book Club sequel.
Picture it, Italy 2023:
After the pandemic put a damper on their in-person book club meetings, college friends Vivian, Sharon, Carol, and Diane have decided to take a trip to celebrate the end of their social distancing. They choose Italy since they planned to go after college graduation, but life delayed their plans.
Coincidentally each is experiencing a new life-changing event. Permanent bachelorette Vivian (Jane Fonda) has accepted a proposal and is now confronted with the idea of marriage for the first time in her life. Judge Sharon (Candice Bergen) is reconciling with the fact that she’s been given the “senior track” at work and now is only called on to perform marriages. Carol (Mary Steenburgen) lost her restaurant in the pandemic and nearly lost her husband to a heart attack. And Diane (Diane Keaton) is a widow who just moved in with her boyfriend (Andy Garcia) but still holds on to her late husband’s ashes.
The women pack up their baggage (emotional and literal) and head for Rome, deciding to make the trip a bachelorette party for Vivian. When they lose their luggage and their plans, the friends will have to rely on their decades-long bond to get through their journey in one piece.
In a world where actresses over the age of 50 are still shuttled off center stage and relegated to the “sassy grandma” role while their male counterparts are paired with 20-something ingenues in romcoms, it’s rather transgressive to have a movie about four older women who enjoy active social and sexual lives. Seeing them bond with each other, adventure through Italy, and have a blast without worrying about what women their age “should” be doing is a treat. The only problem is, it was done better in the 1980s when it was a show called The Golden Girls.
Essentially, this film is a special episode of The Golden Girls where the ladies go to Italy. Fonda is in her Blanche Devereaux era, as the sexy free-spirited friend, Bergen takes on most of the wisecracks in the Dorothy Zbornack role, which leaves Keaton and Steenburgen to share the dippy but moral role of Rose Nylund. It’s not a bad reboot, but the original was sharper and funnier.
Part of the problem is that Keaton and Fonda seem to be stuck in the personas they’ve built for themselves. Keaton can’t go for five minutes without shrieking and flailing her arms or donning a giant hat to prove how quirky she is. Fonda continues to vamp it up as the frisky friend, wearing wigs and batting her eyes for the camera. Both women are tremendous actresses, and it’s a little sad to see them coasting on these personas through film after film. Worse, sometimes their comic timing is off, which kills the punchlines on a few of the running gags.
Bergen, who arguably is still building off her Murphy Brown character, steals the show. She’s still got an excellent sense of comic timing and emphasis that turns even middling jokes into something funny. She holds the screen and has not lost a bit of the wry wit that made her a feminist icon in the 90s. It’s a fun role, and I wish the writing supported her performance.
But in the end, I’m not sure it matters what critics think of these movies. If you check out Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll see the critical score for this movie (which is riddled with cliches and lazy jokes) is in the mid-50s and the audience score is a robust 80-something. There’s a reason for that. Book Club: The Next Chapter isn’t for critics, it’s for people who like watching Jane Fonda vamp and Diane Keaton fall down.
Look, you know what this movie is going to be. It’s exactly the film you think it is from the jokes about “making pasta” to the picturesque tourist locales. If you buy a ticket to Book Club: The Next Chapter expecting high art or John Wick-style action, that’s pretty much on you.
But there is something to be said for catering to different demographics. Comic book fans have Marvel and DC films of wildly varying quality every year, kids get brightly colored vapid cartoons like the Mario movie, why shouldn’t mature women get a middling comedy too? If CNN can foot the bill for Stanley Tucci’s Italian Vacation, and there’s a whole series where Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon wander around Europe doing Michael Caine impressions, it’s about time the women get in on the paid-travelogue genre.
And that leads me to my honest, if mildly snarky, conclusion: This is a movie to take your mom to. For Mother’s Day, buy two tickets, spring for a large popcorn, and take Mom to a movie starring four of her favorite leading ladies. She’ll laugh, she’ll ask you who that man is that looks so familiar (for the record it’s likely Italian star Giancarlo Giannini), and she’ll tell you about her trip to Italy and how she too saw the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps.
This movie is a way to bond with the older women in your family, and for that, it might be worth sitting a few dud one-liners.
Verdict: Take your mom, your auntie, or your grandma to this light, innocuous travelogue comedy.
Book Club: The Next Chapter is rated PG-13 and is available in theaters May 12.
