Capsule Review: Set in Florida, Susan Seidelman’s The Boynton Beach Club revolves around the emotional and romantic travails of a half-dozen denizens of one of those Truman Show-like, manicured communities for the sixty-and-over crowd. Despite the interesting premise — love and sex can be found and enjoyed later in life — director and co-screenwriter Seidelman (and her fellow writers) opted for storytelling that is as formulaic as a 1950s sitcom.
Also, for a movie filled with so much talent in front of the camera — Dyan Cannon, Brenda Vaccaro, Sally Kellerman, Len Cariou — it was disheartening to see potentially humorous and dramatic scenes fall flat one after the other. Worse yet is the realization that those basically conventional senior citizens are played by performers who dabbled in edgy films more than three decades ago. Where has all that (great) subversiveness gone?
On a positive note, it’s good to see that Sally Kellerman remains hot-lipped after all these years.
This movie is just awesome.
Yes, the script is formulaic, but the fact that Boynton Beach Club is a movie featuring — finally! — realistic 60+ people experiencing truthful emotions of living in our later decades is new to Hollywood. We see them grieving, wanting love and touching, distressed about how their older bodies look and act (or don’t act), wanting and fearing to start a relationship after a devastating loss, and finally hurtling towards sex and love with a new person — or being content alone for now.
I’ll remember the moments of emotional authenticity over the tired, cheap jokes (“Whatever you wear, evey man in the place will be drooling.” “Big deal. Most of them are already drooling.”). We all want to love and be loved, touch and be touched, and we all crave (and sometimes fear) the act of giving ourselves — mind, spirit, and body — to another person. This movie made me happy to see our human emotions portrayed honestly — those human emotions that don’t change just because we’ve got wrinkles in front of us and decades behind us.
Ive published a longer review on my blog at http://betterthanieverexpected.blogspot.com/2006/09/boynton-beach-club-film-review.html
–Joan Price
author of Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty (Seal Press, 2006, http://www.joanprice.com/BetterThanExpected.htm)
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