The part of “Couples Retreat” I laughed the mos at was when I was on the phone half an hour before the movie started. The girl I wanted to go with was studying for the bar exam so I called a friend of mine to go. “We’ll be like the movie’s fifth couple. The gay couple,” I told him, congratulating myself.
Well, I thought the remark was funny. The movie, not so much. “Couples Retreat” is a tepid, disorganized romantic-comedy about what happens when four couples (all inexplicably friends) visit a resort designed to fix relationships.
If you were expecting a sincere and poignant story concerned with the adversities of marriage and romance, then I’d have to ask what trailer you saw. These characters are torn right out of the sitcom handbook, a collection of suburban bores who in the absence of poverty only have time to whine about their feelings. There was only one scene that was memorable, and I’ll get back to that in a minute (or however fast you read).
Nabbing the most screen time are Dave and Ronnie (Vince Vaughn and Malin Akerman, age difference eight years), a happily married couple. Even the movie has a hard time selling the idea that they’re in any trouble. When Dave whines about not wanting to shop for tiles, I thought “Just do what Malin Akerman says. She’s the prettiest girl in the movie and the best actress as well.” Some people, huh?
I’ll take this opportunity to note that since “The Break-Up,” Vaughn’s leading women have been getting younger: Jennifer Aniston (one year Vaughn’s senior), Rachel Weisz (same age), Reese Witherspoon (six years younger) and now Akerman. My father once pointed out a sad Hollywood fact to me: if you watch a film from 20 years ago, the actors will still be acting now, but the actresses are all different.
The next couple in line is Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman and Kristin Bell, age difference 11 years), two pedantic nerds having trouble conceiving. After that is Shane and Trudy (Faizon Love and Kali Hawk, age difference probably even wider), a miserable divorce’ and his crass, 20-something sex toy. And to round it out there’s Joey and Lucy (Jon Favreau and Kristin Davis, one year age difference in favor of Davis, i.e. the only remotely plausible coupling in the film), whose prom night child resulted in a torturous union they can’t wait to dissolve once their daughter goes off to college. (This would also make the characters 10 years younger than the actors, but never mind.)
Through a quite convenient series of non-events, all four wind up at East Eden, a tropical resort where the owner is a French nutcase (Jean Reno) who believes that the trick to a successful marriage is yoga and provoking the couples into antagonizing each other. It’s more or less a fill-in-the-blanks situation from there: Male Character goes and does Goofy Activity which then goes horribly wrong while Female Character watches. Male Character screws up and then must apologize to Female Character.
It lurches to a trite conclusion designed not to upset anyone in the audience who insists that every character end happier than when we met them. I suppose it’s harmless fun for those so inclined, but couldn’t Vaughn and Favreau, who also wrote the script, have bothered with something a little more affecting? They seem to be under the impression that mainstream equals vapid.
That one scene: early in the film, Dave hears an intruder rustling around his house. I thought about what I’d write if I were the writer, but dismissed the thought as too far out of the mainstream for a Hollywood production. Then Dave pulls a pistol from his drawer and goes searching for the intruder, exactly what I had been thinking.
It’s an incredible moment of ideology in the middle of this aggressively boilerplate drivel, not at all played as a gag, and one I readily endorse. But I’ll note what the experts tend to: in a house that also contains your wife and kids, call the police first, because starting a firefight in your home is really the last thing you want to do. That this film gave me an excuse to talk about this earns it a whole extra half star.
Check www.marcustheatres.com for showtimes. James endorses “Zombieland.”
