“Book Club” Delivers Laughs and Senior Lifestyle Porn

With its cast of notable stars with long careers – many of them resurging, like Candice Bergen as she reprises her role from popular 90s sitcom, Murphy Brown – a romantic comedy of this sort could easily be a throwaway film. The script itself is hardly spectacular: a group of four friends, bonded for 40 years through a book club, relearn how to live with passion again despite their advanced age. In that way, Book Club flows in the same vein as geriatric comedies like The Bucket List, only lighter, minus speaking characters of color, and without the realities of aging, death, and finances. Instead, it trades those in and adds a backdrop of lifestyle porn. From shows like Entourage to practically anything on HGTV, Book Club fits the sub-genre through its low-stakes drama atop an assumed and effortless wealth and adds the twist by suggestion that aging with passion is better than aging with grace. The premise is notably predictable, with four senior-aged friends whose marital status spreads the logical gamut of anyone’s potential options. Vivian (Jane Fonda) has never married and instead is a powerful hotel owner who traded love for financial and emotional security. “I don’t need anyone,” Vivian would say. “That’s the secret to my success.” Sharon (Candice Bergen) is a federal judge, cat owner, and divorcé of 18 years who hasn’t had sex in the same amount of time. She is the friend most accepting of their loss of vitality. “If women our age were meant to have sex,” Sharon says i…