? A group of Florida sixtysomethings unite around a bereavement group and find new partners. The gentle comedy by director Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) — whose own mom gets a story credit — provides a trio of famous 1970s actresses (Dyan Cannon, Sally Kellerman, Brenda Vaccaro) with good roles, and the male leads (Joseph Bologna, Len Cariou, Michael Nouri) are also semi-familiar faces.
+ Happily, the script
not only avoids making the characters into drooling corpses but also avoids
making them into teenagers with wrinkles. Nobody listens to hip hop (or even
rock), nobody has a pierced tongue, and nobody has a potty mouth that’s
supposed to be cute. The characters each felt real. Being essentially a
romantic comedy, the movie de-emphasizes the negative aspects of aging (such as
health issues), but it does examine the insecurity that can come with being
intimate with a new person after so many years.
- The humor is
benign, and the character arcs have the usual predictability. The “crises” that
develop in the new romances are mild indeed. Some people will probably object
that the group portrayed is a rather homogenous group of upper-middle-class
types, but that’s true of so many Hollywood romantic comedies that it’s hard to
single this out.
= *** There’s nothing
new except that everyone’s old, but that alone is enough of a novelty. And
remember, the movie’s cheaper if you catch the early-bird special.
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