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Scheduling a movie’s release date is an imperfect science and occasionally an art. Just look at the masterpiece that was Barbenheimer. While most are open to experimentation in figuring out just what audiences want and when in the wild west of modern theatrical moviegoing, there’s also an unwritten rule that it’s best to leave big superhero movie weekends clear of competition.
But whoever thought to open the third-act female friendship comedy The Fabulous Four alongside Deadpool & Wolverine deserves a raise. Because if any audience is being underserved on the opening weekend of an oxygen-sucking, violent and self-referential superhero mashup, it’s women over 60.
So, what better way to escape the merc with a mouth than a trip to Key West with Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally?
Although it strains for raucousness with edibles and a parasailing expedition gone wrong, there is something admirably sane about it too, even if you don’t believe a single moment. It begins, as many of these kinds of films do, with a somewhat tortured explanation of why these women became friends in their youth. Though it nods at a slight age difference between college peers Lou (Sarandon) and Marilyn (Midler) and the two gals they met in New York, Alice (Mullally) and Kitty (Ralph), it’s better to not do the math.
Besides, the more interesting question is not why four single girls in the same building became friends, but rather how they maintained that closeness over the decades. This big life mystery goes largely unexplored, instead focusing on the 40-year estrangement between Lou (now a heart surgeon) and Marilyn. It’s a drama that for utterly incomprehensible reasons Alice (a rock star, seriously) and Kitty (a cannabis entrepreneur grandma) are still entangled in.
Marilyn, recently widowed, is newly engaged and desperately wants Lou to be at her wedding. Alice and Kitty lure Lou to Key West under false pretences, telling her that she’s won a polydactyl (six-toed) cat and can visit the Hemingway House. They don’t have anything more elaborate in store in this lie. Their plan, it seems, is just to roll up to Marilyn’s house and surprise their unwitting hostage. This seems misguided at best but becomes retroactively cruel when the cause of the fallout is finally revealed. Why meddle now?
The movie was directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, the Australian filmmaker behind great and varied female-focused films like How to Make an American Quilt, The Dressmaker and Muriel’s Wedding, and written by Jenna Milly and Ann Marie Allison. And it never quite harmonises. These characters, fabulous as they may be individually or on paper, aren’t greater together somehow.
The Fabulous Four, a Bleecker Street release in theatres Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “drug use, some sexual material, language”.
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