108 min | PG-13 | May 12, 2023 | Focus Features
Four friends take their book club to Italy for a bachelorette trip through Rome, Venice, and Tuscany. Keaton, Fonda, Bergen, and Steenburgen can still hold a screen with nothing but chemistry and good lighting. This time that is all they get.
Four longtime friends in a book club take the Italian vacation they always promised themselves. The trigger is Vivian’s engagement to Arthur, which turns the trip into a bachelorette tour of Rome, Venice, and Tuscany. The film presents itself as a story about friendship in the back half of life. It is really a travelogue with a wedding pinned to the end. Bill Holderman strings together monuments and meals and lets the plot drift between them.
Diane Keaton plays Diane with the same fluttering hesitation she brings to every role now, all half-finished sentences and nervous hands. Jane Fonda plays Vivian as the brassy holdout against marriage, and she delivers the innuendo with the timing of someone who has done this for sixty years. Candice Bergen plays Sharon dry and deadpan, and she lands the few jokes that work. Mary Steenburgen plays Carol with warmth and a manic energy the script keeps misusing. The four of them have real chemistry. They talk over each other like women who have known each other for decades, and those moments are the only ones that feel lived in.
Holderman directs from a script he wrote with Erin Simms, and the writing is the problem. The jokes are built almost entirely on the premise that old people having sex is inherently funny, and the film returns to that well until it runs dry. The cinematography treats Italy as a tourism reel. Every frame is a sunlit piazza or a vineyard at golden hour, lit so evenly that no scene carries any weather or mood. The editing cuts from landmark to landmark on a schedule, never letting a conversation breathe before the next gelato. Andy Garcia, Don Johnson, and Craig T. Nelson appear as the men back home and have almost nothing to do.
There is an easy watchability to four gifted actors trading lines in beautiful clothes against beautiful scenery. The film knows this and leans on it instead of writing anything for them to play. It mistakes a vacation for a story and a cast for a screenplay. The tone turns gently condescending toward its own characters, treating their age as the joke rather than the subject. The result goes down smooth and leaves nothing behind.