Cataloging all the things wrong with Boynton Beach Club is enough to age a fellow 20 years.
Imagine bolting a bad teen movie onto a Cocoon-like film about senior citizens and then running it through a Love American Style plot blender. Picture folks on the other side of the biological hill delivering lines like "I really like you. I don't want to mess this up," or "Couldn't we just cuddle?"
Worst of all, consider a film that offers up dramatic possibilities like grief, sexual dysfunction, and stifling loneliness while the entire time - no exaggeration, throughout the whole movie - a cloying, happy soundtrack plays in the background, undercutting every opportunity for depth or nuance by making everything seem perfectly chipper.
From the bad TV-movie quality writing to the overall execution, the desperately shallow Susan Seidelman-directed film has nary a single redeeming quality other than some pretty decent actors in its cast.
The film is set in the sunny Boynton Beach retirement community where lots of cutesy old folks dance down the street during their morning exercise and wear colorful clothes. A plucky bunch, they also meet as part of a bereavement group to talk about the loved ones they've lost.
From there we learn that most old people are as horny and pathetically bent on hooking up with potential mates as the kids on One Tree Hill. Led by Dyan Cannon - whose Botoxed and nip-tucked face is mask-like and spooky - a troupe of older actors like Joseph Bologna, Brenda Vaccaro, and Sally Kellerman amble from scene-to-scene and try and save their dignity while wrestling gamely with a bad script.
Boynton Beach Club touches the surface of a number issues that are loaded with dramatic possibilities but never ceases to pull its punches and go for trite, corny humor when pathos would work so much better.
Just one example: when widower Jack (Len Cariou) prepares to go to bed with Sandy (Sally Kellerman) for the first time, he's confronted with his sagging body, and hers. He's been to the drug store and purchased Viagra and stares at his shirtless self in the mirror before heading to the bedroom where she waits, the ghost of his dead wife lurking in the shadows of his conscience...
And you feel nothing. The scene calls for a long, drawn-out, intensely awkward exchange between two good actors. It begs for the characters talking about how it feels, really feels, to have a romantic reawakening late in life and the scene begs for a lingering, patient touch. You want to feel just how weird it must be to get naked with someone new for the first time when you're well into your 60s.
Instead, neither character has been developed to any extent - they're jumping into the sack on just their second date - and an opportunity is missed when the scene is tidied up quickly and flashes to the next morning when something apparently happened. Something that has Jack seeing her off in his robe in the driveway while the neighbors look on.
And on we go to a happy ending that proves getting older and losing your spouse is just a positive step toward finding someone potentially better and handsomer and who drives a neat convertible Mustang. Or maybe you could hook up with the hot girl from high school who's now a hot senior citizen.
Seriously.
Rather than really dig into the rich dramatic potential of life, and love, past 60, Boynton Beach Club gives its characters nothing more to do than whistle past the graveyard.
Contact Rod Lockwood at rlockwood@theblade.com or 419-724-6159.
First Published October 6, 2006, 11:56 a.m.
