Diane Keaton, Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard

From left: Diane Keaton, Kathy Bates, and Alfre Woodard in “Summer Camp”

Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

If Hollywood aims to bring older audiences back into theaters by making movies about them, then I’m all for it summer camp As a case study of what works (Eugene Levy!) and what certainly doesn’t – the painfully flat attempts at silliness are the main culprit. This reunion-focused comedy oscillates between tense slapstick comedy and thoughtful chit-chat, with a cast of witty septuagenarians in a mostly laugh-free zone of pressured lines and predictable beats.

Director Castiel Landon’s screenplay offers some well-crafted dialogue, but it never adds to anything resembling momentum. Landon, whose previous features include starring as Katherine Heigl Fear of rain And two entries in after A series of romantic films, revolving around the story of three lifelong friends at a sleepover camp where they meet for the first time. The friends are played by Diane Keaton (who also serves as a producer), Kathy Bates, and Alfre Woodard. Woodsy Camp Pinnacle is played at a real-life location of the same name in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

The backstory sequence reveals how the trio of misfit campers at Pinnacle became inseparable in their youth. Hard-working Nora Keaton (Taylor-Madeleine Hand), sweet Mary Woodard (Audriana Lecco) and the older, more worldly Jenny as Bates (Kensington Thalman) had each other’s backs, especially when it came to withstanding the ridicule of Pinnacle’s standard issue of mean girls. Known as the Beautiful Commission, she is played in her current incarnations by Beverly D’Angelo, Victoria Rowell, and Maria Howell.

This setting not only establishes the characters of the central trio, but also sets up the film’s basic thesis: 50 years later, they are still, essentially, teenagers. Which makes returning to summertime stomping grounds sweet, silly, and poignant. Amidst all this routine busyness, there is a glimmer of every woman’s inner child.

The problem is that everyone here clearly has one thing going, and that thing needs to be fixed. Keaton’s widowed boss is a workaholic, Woodard’s married emergency room nurse is chronically selfless and arrogant, and Bates’s Jenny has turned her take-charge world into a self-help empire with more than just a know-it-all advantage. , with the line “Get Your Shit Together” clearly going to bounce back.

Both Bates and Woodard can pack a world of nuance into a gesture or glance, while Keaton’s chatty routine, as presented here, seems calcified in distracting sarcasm. It’s hard to believe that the volatile Nora is a CEO. On the other hand, moments of weakness that break through her confusion have a much greater impact in disrupting this pattern.

A best-selling author with a buzzing brand tour bus, strong-armed Jenny Mary and Nora, who haven’t had time to meet in years, join her at a week-long Camp Pinnacle reunion, their first ever, and surprise them. With a gleaming caliber maisonette (low production design by Scott Daniel).

Dropping names and handing out sex toy gifts along with unsolicited advice, Jenny doesn’t mince words, and she has a knack for it. “You seem to be hiding behind a lot of socially sanctioned hashtags,” Jane tells D’Angelo — a remarkable diagnosis not only for a character obsessed with appearance but also for a virtue-signaling age. Landon’s screenplay weaves some good takes into the general self-help vein, targeting familiar territory in ways that avoid cliché.

Both Nora’s teen crush, the “smart” Stevie Dee (Levy), and Mary’s “handsome as hell” Tommy (Dennis Haysbert, the young man in the central cast, who turns 70 a few days after the film’s release). She appears at the gathering, comfortably solo and gently reignites those old flames.

Haysbert doesn’t have much to do here except provide the gentle depths of his voice and show good-guy sentiment, which he does very well. The scene that may be the pinnacle of comedy belongs to him and Woodard: a nearly silent sequence on a pottery wheel, the intimacy and vertigo — not to mention the phallic symbolism — captured well by cinematographer Carsten Gopinath.

A retired Levi’s executive counters Nora’s compulsive devotion to her job with his relatively new commitment to work-life balance. What’s more, the pace of his line readings and edits bring the film’s choppy, moody energy to a compellingly quiet place.

Landon’s over-reliance on back-and-forth reaction shots gives many of the exchanges an uncomfortable feeling rather than allowing the actors to find the center of the action. That’s when things calm down summer camp He finds his heart and his nerve—particularly in a late-night conversation between the three friends about loneliness, romance, and independence, and in tentative conversations between potential spouses. Humor also seems better in these cases.

As for the camp staff, Josh Peck brings a gentle honesty to the role of Jimmy, a counselor searching for a career. The reunion activities are overseen by a barely-there figure of New Age coolness aptly named Sage (Nicole Richie). She mainly provides quiet, non-judgmental ballast to the weary oddities of her overzealous assistant, Vic, with Betsy Sodaro channeling something between Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids Kenison Medal.

like summer camp With its unfunny physical humor, unconvincing disasters, and quickly resolved “tensions,” Tom Howe’s playful score reassures us that everything will be okay. But along the way, there’s some madness from Jenny, who takes no prisoners when it comes to the doctrine of ditching toxic relationships. No matter how harsh her statements are, especially those aimed at the unhappily married Mary, we know that she is right most of the time. We also know that Landon has sapped any friction from Mary’s dilemma by making her husband (Tom Wright) blatantly ignorant and wrong for her.

As much as Bates illustrates Jenny’s self-absorption and domineering nature, she also shows how honest she is when she urges women—strangers and friends alike—not to settle. To Landon’s credit, she did not devise a romantic “solution” for this self-made, intensely single woman.

However, this is the only time summer camp Really subverts expectations. It goes where it’s supposed to go, with some good moments along the way and many non-starters. When the inevitable food fight breaks out, this may just be the case Animal house Callback or, as Stevie D says, something from the Three Stooges. Either way, you may be tempted to follow him as he heads toward the exit.