Movie Review: Couples Retreat

A friend dragged me to see Couples Retreat on Friday night. Even with a $70 million budget, $87 million in gross domestic sales, Vince Vahn and Jason Bateman, I didn’t expect much from the film. My low expectations were, alas, too sanguine, as I left shaking by head at how bad a movie it was. Like so much Hollywood drivel these days, the film was unfunny, overly earnest and finished with a silly, uninspired denouement that made me look back to remember if marriage was really this depressing. I will leave that thought unexamined, but I have to say that Hollywood has forgotten how to make good comedies in the past several years. Even the promising directors like Wes Anderson seem to get worse not better with age, and the mainstream ilk that now passes for romantic comedy is truly disheartening. The question is how one can spend $70 million without finding more than a half dozen real laughs? How can a decent cast go so wrong? Why do they presume that the American audiences are so daft that they accept a bad relationship suddenly gone right for no other reason than that is what we expected to begin with? The lack of chemistry between the main characters is palpable, the misuse of Vahn’s charisma borderline criminal and the general somber tone deaf to the desire of audiences continuing to be beaten down by the financial crisis.

One wonders if mainstream comedy has gone the way of action film: huge budgets, a big star or three and no plot to speak of. It’s truly depressing when not only HBO and Showtime but the big three continue to do much better writing than those in Hollywood. It appears as if the huge budgets lead execs and producers to put so much focus on marketing they forget one of the most important aspect of filmmaking – a decent script. The humor is generally base, the funny send-up of new age wisdom undermined by the poor delivery of the cast and too quick a shift to depressing treatment of the alienation of modern coupling, and the storyline so dull I have to rethink my next island vacation. It seemed at times as if the film was trying to make two films at once, and neither was developed. One was a screwball comedy on an island, which has never really been a winner. The other was our continued artistic reflection on the ways in which love fades under the force of marriage and kids. In any case, the American filmgoing population seems to have been effectively inoculated from movie reviewers in recent years. The marketing is all around a huge opening weekend, followed by a huge drop off in subsequent weeks as everyone else realizes it is yet another disaster film – though without any dystopia except for those who fall prey to wasting about two hours of their time. Maybe someday the American public will wake up and demand that Hollywood make a decent film besides in the couple of months leading up to Christmas and the Oscar voting season. Of course it seems as likely as stores closing for a Holiday rather than having blockbuster sales to make sure we don’t spend any quality time with our families . . . (D)