There’s been hubbub in the annals of Film Twitter recently surrounding the lack of attention paid to lighting in modern mainstream American movies. Usually the issue is dimness — digital cameras can produce muddy and dull images and the conventional wisdom holds that directors of photography are simply paying less attention to the subtleties of meaning that withholding or bathing their images in light can drum up. Ticket to Paradise, a romantic comedy that coaxed Julia Roberts and George Clooney out of semi-retirement, is almost parodic in its decision to go in the other direction. Every frame is blindingly bright and its colors are garishly distinguished. Unfortunately, as with the rest of the film’s decidedly throwback energy, this would only be welcome if it felt competently executed.
The bursts of tropical color and glowing sunlight in Ticket to Paradise are at odds with what is, at heart, the story of two rather nasty and prickly people learning to love each other again. Georgia (Roberts, clad in an array of fabulous jumpsuits and rompers) and David (Clooney) were married for five years decades ago, during which time they had a daughter, Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), who is, as the film opens, graduating from NYU’s law school and set to begin her career at a prestigious firm in Chicago. First, though, she embarks on a last-hoorah excursion to Bali with her best friend, the stereotypical wild child Wren (Billie Lourd), to blow off some steam. But Lily’s second thoughts about being a lawyer and submitting to a white-collar, presumably corporate existence are exacerbated when she meets and falls in love with Gede (Maxime Bouttier), a local seaweed farmer on the island. Thus commences Lily’s acrimonious parents jetting off to Bali (production actually took place in Australia) for Lily’s hastily mounted wedding to hopefully dissuade her from the arrangement.
For starters, as one might be able to tell from that plot description, the film is confused about which characters we actually care about. As promising an actor as Dever is, Ticket to Paradise is presumably a film centered on and powered by the movie star charisma of its two legacy leads, and yet it spends far too much time away from them, caught up in the inconsequential relationship between Lily and Gede. The film’s narrative mechanics are similarly out of whack when the time comes for Georgia and David to begin seeing each other in a different light, after years of resentment and hostility. We’re told in the dialogue that they’re starting to get along, but we’ve seen little to no evidence of that and, as the character voicing this points out, if we are, it’s only because they’re bonding via their scheme to goad Lily to not marry Gede. This plan takes up a good portion of the 100-minute film’s second act and the screenplay by Daniel Pipski and the movie’s director, Ol Parker, doesn’t illustrate why we should care about these petty people or why they would be motivated to sabotage their daughter’s life other than the flimsy reasoning that matrimony didn’t work out so well for them either.
In fact, the script is really the primary issue here, because a classically molded comedy of remarriage such as this one (a subgenre that harks back to 1930s and ‘40s classics like The Philadelphia Story and The Lady Eve) ought to deliver pithy rejoinders and taut, wordy conversations, at which Ticket to Paradise tries and fails. From the moment Roberts and Clooney start bickering, it’s clear they don’t have the witty material this set-up requires — almost all of the exchanges between the pair play like an inexact facsimile of clever banter. The screenplay basically has two modes: in keeping with the overly cruel temperament of both leads, it offers up tone-deaf jokes such as the comparison of Georgia to a “very attractive horse.” Or, conversely, Parker and Pipski traffic in cheap pop psychology: “being loved is not the same as loving.”
The second category is the stuff of many much more successful films in this genre, because if the performances and filmmaking can breathe life into clichés, they’re as good as new. But Roberts and Clooney struggle to spark any tangible magnetism, either together or apart. Clooney in particular mostly flounders — one is left yearning for the careful tonal calibration and sharp pens of the Coen Brothers, with whom the star made, among other things, the unfairly maligned screwball rom-com Intolerable Cruelty. His line readings in Ticket to Paradise are half-hearted and unconvincing and his presence forced, leaving this critic wondering if (absent the Coens’ guidance), he’s ever been an actor of much stature in the first place. Likewise, the film itself does its best to make us forget why this once-vital genre was valuable.
Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
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