Score: 3.5 / 5
Paradise, indeed! This blast from the past is the best kind of feel-good romantic comedy for the nostalgic viewer. That soft, golden shimmer to each shot makes it feel like a living, breathing fantasy. Its magnificent stars are churning out their most tried-and-true techniques, reliably winsome and effortlessly rousing. Scarcely a beat of this film is unexpected or surprising. We know every moment before it happens, and then seeing it results in joy after exquisitely satisfying joy. It's also, I reiterate, a fantasy, one that is nearly as problematic in terms of its privilege as it is rapturous in terms of the lovely dream it realizes.
David (George Clooney) and Georgia (Julia Roberts) ended their marriage twenty years ago and still actively hate each other. Despite their mutual regret over having had a relationship at all, they love their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), who just graduated law school. On her post-graduation trip in Bali, she meets a seaweed farmer named Gede and falls in love; after a little more than a month, they announce their engagement and her intention to live in Bali and forsake her expected legal career. David and Georgia temporarily shake hands to put a new plan into action: hurry to Bali and convince Lily that she is rushing into dangerous decisions and making similar mistakes to their own.
Of course, everyone is wealthy enough to do all the things just described, including dropping everything to fly to Bali for an apparently unplanned amount of time, to say nothing of their careers or alma maters. Their stability allows them the luxury of bitterness, specifically the parents, who lob zingers at each other as often as possible. Given that they are Clooney and Roberts, it's not so much that we care exactly what they're saying so much as that they're the ones saying it. Their charisma and charm carry the film even when the screenplay isn't quite savvy enough to know what to do with them; the camera, makeup and costume artists, and director certainly do!
The secondary plot -- that of Lily and her blossoming romance -- is completely unbelievable, the kind of screwball-comedy plot that made rom-coms famous guilty pleasures in decades past. While Dever herself isn't terrible (no performances are incompetent here, thankfully), her one-note part is sorely underwritten. She's rounded out a bit by her companion Wren (a delightful Billie Lourd) and her paramour Gede (Maxime Bouttier), but the romance isn't explored or explained or even featured in any way that allows for much dramatic heft. It's in fact such a lazy element to the proceedings, one wonders what might have happened if this entire plot had been cut. Couldn't Lily and Wren have gone on vacation and the parents have tagged along to celebrate, or spy on them or each other? That change would have cut a significant amount of worldbuilding and the shy introduction of Gede's enormous family and the lack of character development or even significance.
But that wouldn't really be the style of director Ol Parker, who also wrote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel (which really deserves more sequels). His genius includes a consideration of Other cultures than white bourgeois Westerners. Is it orientalism? Maybe, but in the Hotel franchise it's also deeply sincere and sensitive. Here, it's less of those and a bit more escapist and tourist in its attention to the Balinese seaweed farmers depicted, but I don't think that makes it a bad thing either. The white characters come in like "stupid rich" archetypes and are forced to confront serious emotional issues with each other; the setting is less about itself and more about getting the main characters out of their own comfort zones. Albeit in a place that is repeatedly referred to as paradise. And that's really what we're here for too; not the drama or realism or profundity or insight, just the beauty and joy and love.
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