October 16, 2009: Couples Retreat
Just what am I looking for? Stupid characters behaving stupidly? Smart characters behaving stupidly? Stupid people who somehow become smart? When I see a mindless comedy, I’m expecting an engaging and original story idea, characters who are relatable but not clichéd, jokes flying fast and furious but not so quickly that it feels forced, and growth in the characters despite the fact that it means they discover and fix in a matter of days what has been dragging down their lives for years.
Couples Retreat, on the surface, would be entirely comparable to the blockbuster comedy The Hangover which was released earlier this year. So why did I hate The Hangover despite its near-80% freshness rating at RottenTomatoes, but enjoy Couples Retreat despite its 12% fresh (i.e. rotten) rating? This review will dance around that question, but I really can’t answer it. They are both pandering crap, not to say that that’s necessarily bad, but it’s an inauspicious start.
We have four couples, one of which (the control freaks who have a Powerpoint presentation for everything) is trying to get pregnant and struggling and it’s affecting their marriage. They want to go to a renowned tropical couples retreat with fun and sun and therapy, to reconnect. It’s pricey, but if all four couples join in, there’s a great discount. Of course nobody thinks this can fit into their busy lives, but eventually they find themselves all on a plane and heading for Eden.
Once at the resort, the couples loosen up and start to enjoy the amenities, until realizing that the couples therapy they were told was optional is in fact quite mandatory, and early in the morning to boot. But they play along. The therapy sessions get to the root of the couples’ problems very quickly. Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell as the control freaks are getting too wound up to pay attention to what each other wants. Jon Favreau and Kristin Davis are high school sweethearts frustrated at never having grown past that stage, and cheating on each other. Faizon Love is newly separated from his wife and at the retreat with his new barely-20 girlfriend, trying to enjoy the trip but finding himself exhausted by the partying antics of his much younger lady friend. And Vince Vaughn and Malin Akerman are the classic couple caught up in life, with kids and jobs and no time, who never even got to go on their honeymoon. The therapy sessions are simplistic but honest, and refreshingly brief since they could have easily overstayed their welcome.
Bateman has a bit of a breakdown, Bell disappears to the other side of the resort (the singles side!), and the women and the men are split up as the men try to retrieve/rescue their wives. This stress and some soul-searching result in the reuniting of all of the couples, including Faizon Love’s wife, who has come down to the resort to chase after him. Everyone ends up happy.
I felt that two of the reunions were believable, and two simply weren’t, which was the major misstep for this movie. The obvious age discrepancy in some of the couples was also distracting. It seemed that the women were generally much younger than the men. Checking the ages of the actors themselves, things weren’t quite as outrageous as I had feared, but still, Akerman at 31 and Vaughn at 39 don’t look like a couple who have weathered years and years together, and Bateman at 40 and Bell at 29 show Hollywood’s matching up of the stars of the day, as long as the men are well-established and popular and the women are good-looking and young.
I liked Couples Retreat despite myself. Vaughn and Favreau, who have great chemistry and have been buddies for a long time, add a lot with their scenes (I saw a review declaring them to be the most believable couple in the movie). Ken Jeong and John Michael Higgins have juicy little roles as therapists which suit them perfectly. Jean Reno, as the brain behind the Eden resort and couples therapy, brings weight to the high-concept plot in the way that a well-respected older actor often does in these silly comedies. Mind you, throughout the film the characters are mostly clichés but it fortunately doesn’t try to portray them as anything else. The PG-13 rating limits the comedy to a certain extent but also forces it to try to use innuendo and real jokes instead of copping out with gross-out or hyper-sexual gags and language, in contrast with The Hangover, which fully embraced its R-rating. What can I say about Couples Retreat? I certainly can’t recommend it in good conscience, but it was far better than I was expecting and a huge winner for me compared with the much more popular The Hangover. See this if you’re a completist on any of the big players, but otherwise you could use your time more wisely.
Unchallenging comedy fills the time nicely.
Post a Comment