by Christine Westwood
Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullaly, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Bruce Greenwood, Michael Bolton
Intro:
It’s a romp where you don’t want to look too hard at a few dodgy premises that hark back to a pre-feminist era.
Well, they are fabulous, no doubt about that. There is the Divine Miss M, aka Bette Midler, the incomparable Susan Sarandon, Will & Grace’s Megan Mullally and TV regular Sheryl Lee Ralph.
They play, respectively, Marilyn, Lou, Alice and Kitty, four friends who reunite on the occasion of Marilyn’s wedding. Or, as the tag line states, ‘Four friends. One wedding. Lots of baggage.’
The Fabulous Four may have a frothy wedding veneer but there will indeed be a likelihood of emotional ‘baggage’. The film has a fabulous director too. Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof, The Dressmaker) has been awarded top accolades during her 40-year career in both film and TV, and demonstrates a skilled hand with a high profile ensemble cast (How to Make an American Quilt).
The opening of the film takes us back to the four women in college, told through a montage of photos of the actors’ own photos from when they were fresh and young. Lou and Marilyn were besties, but it quickly transpires that Marilyn betrayed Lou by stealing her man and marrying him. It’s this tension that drives the narrative and fires off comic scenarios, especially where the other friends, Alice and Kitty, conspire to reunite the warring women in hopes they will put the past to rest.
The writers, Ann Marie Allison and Jenna Milly, have played with character tropes that belong to the Baby Boomer era, for example Lou the brainy girl, a spectacles wearing workaholic, and Kitty the earth mother carrying on a 1960s tradition by farming cannabis. There’s a biting sub plot where Kitty’s daughter has gone to fundamental religion in reaction to her mother’s freewheeling ways. Marilyn is the dizzy party girl, updated into an age denying bride addicted to TikTok, while Alice hangs on to her rock n roll muso persona, her sex, drugs and booze habits worthy of Ab Fab’s Patsy or Sex and the City’s Samantha.
Of the four, Megan Mullaly nails it. Even in scenes where she is incidental to the main drama, she is in her own world of impeccable comic timing that is fun to watch. The scene on a plane where it transpires that she is drug smuggling is especially and subtly good.
The location is Quay West, where Marilyn has her mansion home. It’s a suitably garish, cartoon land of a place where chickens walk the streets and hyped-up tourists form a constant audience to the women’s dramas – all recorded on social media, of course. There are scenes at the beach, a strip show in a glitzy bar, a comedy of errors at other venues. In fact, there is a flavour of Shakespeare’s slapstick, bawdiness and mistaken identities, a kind of Much Ado about Nothing, where young lovers are swapped for ageing couples and different outcomes.
The male cast make the best of their roles, mainly devices to play off the female dramas. Kaydan Well Bennett is Kitty’s grandson Nathan, Bruce Greenwood is ‘silver fox’ Ted, while Timothy V Murphy manages to create a rounded character for his turn as Captain Ernie. Swapping, pairing, fights and reconciliations and musical numbers, there’s more than a touch of Mamma Mia!
It’s a romp where you don’t want to look too hard at a few dodgy premises that hark back to a pre-feminist era. Or perhaps that is exactly what the film wants us to consider, asking us if we have moved on in the face of ageing? Fabulous or sad? Wiser or Dimmer? You decide.
