CAMPING IT UP

Now in the multiplexes:

Summer Camp--As she's been doing for most of the last three decades, Diane Keaton here cranks out another fluffy senior chick-flick comedy. The formula, seen in the Book Club flicks and Mack & Rita and others, is simple: Assemble Keaton and some other big names popular with the AARP crowd in a pleasant setting for some undemanding romance and mild slapstick, then pad it out to at least an hour and a half.

In this one, written and directed by Castille Landon, Keaton finds herself at Camp Pinnacle, nestled in gorgeous forest scenery in North Carolina, at a camp reunion with cohorts Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard. Keaton is a widowed hotshot biotech exec; Woodard is an accomplished but unhappily married nurse who really wanted to be doctor, and Bates is a rich celebrity self-help author with a devoted following. They met at Camp Pinnacle as kids, and Bates is trying to make them keep their vow they'd always stay pals.

Other mature favorites are around, like Beverly D'Angelo as the adult version of the pretty-girl alpha, Eugene Levy as a love interest for Keaton and Dennis Haysbert as a love interest for Woodard. As a bone to anyone under fifty who wanders in, Betsy Sodaro, Josh Peck and Nicole Richie are thrown in as camp staffers.

This movie is quite terrible, but all three of the leads are high on the list of the best film actors of the last fifty years. It's possible to react to this in two ways; one, that it's a disgrace they all aren't doing something better with their time and glorious talents, or, two, that it's simply great to see them, and to see them together, hanging out, being silly, and making money as leading ladies. Indeed, it seems to be possible to react to Summer Camp in both of these ways at the same time.

If they're going to keep doing stuff like this, however, it really seems like Keaton and cronies could find somebody to write them some snappier dialogue than the meandering stuff they shrug out here. Most shocking, perhaps, was how the filmmakers went to the trouble to hire Eugene Levy, only to use him as a bland straight man to Keaton. He's still charming, but he had, I think, one laugh line of his own. Maybe it was a nice summer vacation for him.

FEEL THE BERN(ADETTE)

Now in theaters:

The Miracle Club--After many decades in Boston, Chrissie has returned to her working class neighborhood in Dublin in 1967, following the death of her long-estranged mother. She gets a cold reception from her old friend Eileen (Kathy Bates) and from Lily (Maggie Smith), the mother of her teenage lover who later died by drowning.

Lily and Eileen are about to leave on a trip to Lourdes; somehow Chrissie (Laura Linney) ends up on the bus too. Also on the trip is Dolly (lovely Agnes O'Casey; a descendant of Sean, no less!), a young mother hoping the waters at Lourdes will heal her little son Daniel, who hasn't started speaking yet.

This comedy-drama, directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan from a script by Jimmy Smallhorne, Timothy Prager and Joshua D. Maurer, doesn't push too deep into the psychology and theology of pilgrimages to holy places and the search for authentic supernatural miracles. About as far as the exploration goes is the pronouncement of the priest (Mark O'Halloran): "You don't go to Lourdes for a miracle; you go for the strength to go on when there is no miracle." Well, okay, but...so many questions.

Mostly the pilgrimage is used here as a device to gradually tease out the poignant backstory of the characters, and to give them a symbolic redemption. There's also a good deal of comedy derived from the bumbling husbands, including Stephen Rea as Eileen's not-much-better half, cluelessly trying to manage back home without their wives. 

So the movie is slight, despite being adjacent to some intriguing themes. But if you appreciate fine acting, can you really afford to miss this ensemble? Between the quietly intent Linney, the bitter and frightened Bates and the chastened, open-hearted Smith, trying to decide who carries the most grandeur is not a critical task I find myself up to. Their talent is, you know, miraculous.

PERIOD PIECE

Opening this weekend:

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret--It begins with a shot of an adolescent girl, yelling with joy. She's literally a happy camper; we're seeing the summer before our heroine Margaret turns 12, and her life changes, inside and out. She comes home from camp to learn that her family--except for her adored and adoring grandmother--is moving from New York to small town New Jersey.

She quickly falls in with a new circle of friends, all of whom are anxiously but eagerly awaiting their first periods. The child of a mixed, non-practicing Jewish-Christian marriage, Margaret is so anxious about this milestone that she nonetheless starts talking to God, politely pleading with the Almighty to let her start puberty and "be normal."

For half a century now, Judy Blume's classic, sometimes (absurdly) controversial 1970 coming-of-age novel has been almost as much a rite of passage for American girls as the social and biological shifts it dramatizes. But it's never been a movie before; reportedly Blume never liked a script until the adaptation by Kelly Fremon Craig of The Edge of Seventeen, who also directed.

Apparently Blume's instincts are good. The resulting film is a home run, sweet and low-key yet cumulatively emotional. Abby Ryder Fortson is marvelously un-histrionic and endearing as Margaret; her spot-on line readings suggest the budding phase of a wary but observant and empathetic person. Craig's script slightly fleshes out the character of Margaret's frustrated-painter Mom, and Rachel McAdams gives the character her own hints of uncertainty; Benny Safdie works well as Margaret's good-natured Dad. Kathy Bates is showcased as the jolly Grandma, a fiercely pro-Margaret partisan who is overjoyed when her granddaughter asks to be taken to Temple.

Margaret's friends are a fine ensemble, led by the amusingly impudent Elle Graham as Nancy. Frizz-haloed Aidan Wojtak-Hissong makes an impression as the lawn-mowing Moose Freed; so does Isol Young as the towering Laura Danker, who has gained a reputation on the basis of nothing more than having bloomed early. Echo Kellum seems to have stepped directly out of the '70s as the earnest newbie teacher Mr. Benedict.

This is an example of Craig's best decision: to not update the material. The movie is set in the year of the book's publication, and the production design and soundtrack invoke 1970 so vividly that it may feel like a flashback to those of us who remember it. The legion of grown-up fans of the book will likely be delighted by this fidelity.

The question, of course, is what the film will mean to audiences Margaret's age. I recently asked a mom of two daughters if girls are still embarrassed about their periods; she assured me that they are. But it's hard to say if the novel's candor on that subject is as unusual as it was in 1970.

It should be noted, of course, that menstruation, or even the issues around adolescent crushes and friendships, are far from the only themes here. A family move that you don't want but are helpless to stop, for instance, is a relatable strife for kids regardless of gender, and when Margaret looks out her bedroom window at her bustling New York neighborhood, Craig makes us feel what a loss this will be.

The story also transcends mere health class manual utility in its treatment of Margaret's religious explorations. Her gentle, personal, terror-free, open-hearted conversations with God--as in Whoever is Listening--are in healthy contrast to the stress and guilt and family conflict she experiences in connection with organized religion. The movie makes a case for a secular upbringing, even for theists.

UNDERCOVER CLAUS

Opening today:

Bad Santa 2—Back in 2003, I was in the midst of what I regarded as a particularly un-merry holiday season. I saw Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa, and laughed so hard that I thought I might need medical attention. It wasn’t an especially well-made movie, but its childish upending of clichéd holiday wholesomeness essentially saved Christmas for me that year.

Billy Bob Thornton returns in this 13-years-belated sequel, again as Willie, a drunken, depressive, fetishistic safecracker who uses a Santa costume as his front. Here he’s pressed into service by his diminutive former accomplice Marcus (Tony Cox), donning the costume again to rob a fraudulent charity in Chicago. The mastermind—if that’s the word—behind the plot is Willie’s loathed mother Sunny (Kathy Bates).

Few would suggest that this episodic, clumsily-structured caper farce is crackerjack moviemaking. It relies on a ridiculously easy comedic strategy—set up saccharine Christmas imagery and music and blow raspberries at it.

So sure, Bad Santa 2 isn’t a great movie. But Billy Bob Thornton is a great movie star. I don’t just mean he’s a great actor, though he is; he also has the authoritative presence of a true star. Watching him here isn’t just watching a drawly guy spout vile obscenity and epithets—amusing enough for a while, but only for a while—it’s also getting a taste of the vast, defeated bleakness of outlook from which this invective arises.

His characterization carries a whisper of the tragic to it, and indeed this might take over and spoil the fun if it weren’t for Willie’s strange magnetism, sexual and otherwise. In the first movie he was irresistible to Lauren Graham; here his romantic—if that’s the word—interest is Christina Hendricks. So how sorry for him can we feel?

Besides, like the original, Bad Santa 2 is every bit as sentimental as any Christmas movie. We’re meant to see that the true source of Willie’s misery is that, at bottom, he’s a thoroughly decent-hearted fellow.

The journeyman director, Mark Waters, moves things along with reasonable efficiency. Bates is formidable as ever as Sunny. Cox, Octavia Spencer and Brett Kelly—as the oddball Thurman Merman—are amusing in reprised roles from the original. But Thornton is the real show. If, for whatever reason, you aren’t feeling as festive this year as tradition demands, Bad Santa 2 might help you vent some of your negativity. Just don’t take the kiddies.