It all started with The Golden Girls. Gather a few senior gal pals with divergent personalities, throw in the occasional zinger about hip replacements or middle-aged sex, and add a platitude or two about friendship, along with some gentle truth-telling. The pioneering NBC sitcom, which showcased four 60-ish roommates chatting over late-night cheesecake in their shared Miami home, helped normalize perceptions of aging women as something other than doddering biddies or chaste old maids. It inspired similar onscreen depictions in movies such as Calendar Girls, Poms, Queen Bees and the recent 80 for Brady. The most prominent of the films in this subgenre is 2018’s Book Club, which featured a quartet of lifetime friends whose monthly literary group’s selection of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy sounded a wake-up call to dormant libidinal and romantic desires.
Now, five years later, comes Book Club: The Next Chapter, starring the same stellar cast of veteran actresses playing a less hale but still well-to-do version of those novel-reading golden girls. After enduring two years of impersonal Zoom calls to discuss reading selections during the COVID quarantine (remember how popular Normal People was back then?) they decide to take full advantage of their post-lockdown freedom and travel to Italy to celebrate the upcoming nuptials of the club’s only never-married member, Vivian (Fonda).
While the first film was nothing special – it often felt like a packaged product, in the worst Nancy Meyers sort of way – it still had some snap-crackle-and-pop energy now and then. This sequel, however, plays like soggy cereal. The tossed-off bachelorette party storyline and accompanying subplots devoted to each of the four characters are way less compelling than the travelogue showcasing the spectacular beauty of Rome, Venice, and Florence. Several group hugs and many glasses of wine later, you rouse from a coma of mediocrity, your memory of the movie dominated by smirking asides about a handsome Venetian chef’s meatballs and his big cucina.
The four leads have little to do. Then again, they’ve all earned the right to coast a little, right? You could say the relaxed casualness of their performances is consistent with the characters’ 50 years of friendship. But you may want to watch or rewatch the first film to acquaint or reacquaint yourself with these women because this sequel pretty much limits them to types. Of the four actresses, Bergen seems the most at ease, drolly throwing off one-liners – those years of experience playing Murphy Brown come to the rescue here. She also portrays what feels like the most real character in the bunch. (The same was true for the first film.) In a scene that shamelessly repeats a sight gag from the initial Book Club, Bergen’s disheveled appearance – sideways bouffant, smeared makeup, untucked blouse, cat-ate-the-canary facial expression – as she and her paramour exit a docked water taxi one wine-soaked evening is ridiculously funny, so help me. Maybe blondes do have more fun.
This article appears in May 12 • 2023.
