Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda et al go on a bookish holiday after keeping their reading club going through lockdown, but jokes are thin on the ground
Bill Holderman’s 2018 silver-years comedy Book Club had the amusing idea of showing us four prosperous female friends – Vivian (Jane Fonda), Diane (Diane Keaton), Sharon (Candice Bergen) and Carol (Mary Steenburgen), given to drinking balloon glasses of wine and laughing life-affirmingly in picture-perfect kitchens – who are radicalised by reading Fifty Shades of Grey and inspired to overhaul their personal relationships. Now for the sequel: it is a few years later, the heroines have gone through the Covid lockdown and kept their book club going on Zoom, flirting with Sally Rooney’s Normal People, but heart-sinkingly sticking with lite fare such as Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.
Yet books are irrelevant to their new adventure: a bachelorette holiday together in Italy before Vivian marries to her boyfriend Arthur (Don Johnson). The wacky quartet have adventures in Rome, Florence and Venice before a romantic finale looms for more than one of them. There are some reasonable moments, but the feelgood mission seems to have ruled out any real jokes. Setting to one side what might ungallantly be called the inscrutability issue, the stars’ performances are subdued and de-feisted by the limp script, which for some reason permits only Bergen to be anything approaching funny: she is tough, shrewd, looks like a real person and getting laid is her prerogative also.
