Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Bette Midler in The Fabulous Four. Casting and themes make films like this one, with older characters, easy to classify but tough to label.
Star-studded with leading ladies, who are all a bit older, recent comedies like The Fabulous Four and 80 for Brady are establishing a popular new genre.
There are two new films this year in which Academy Award-nominated actresses in their 70s whip out tiny sex toys. In Summer Camp, Kathy Bates offers up wee vibrators to Alfre Woodard and Diane Keaton. In The Fabulous Four, it’s Bette Midler giving Susan Sarandon a kegel ball that she later flings at a bike thief.
You might confuse these comedies with Book Club (2018), where Keaton, again, finds herself in the company of fellow older luminaries (Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen). Or with Poms (2019), which places Keaton on a retirement community cheer squad with Jacki Weaver, Rhea Perlman and Pam Grier. Then, again, there’s also 80 for Brady (2023), where Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Sally Field and Rita Moreno go to the Super Bowl.
Though the circumstances are different, the similarities in plot, casting and themes make the films easy to classify but tough to label. “Legendary ladies of cinema do a light romp,” is a little long; “Old lady comedies” might seem demeaning, but that is, essentially, how the films identify themselves. In the 80 for Brady trailer, Moreno sums it up by saying: “The Super Bowl is no place for four old women.”
Regardless of the label, this growing genre of star-studded comedies has become popular in recent years, with Four becoming the latest instalment in the canon.
You can usually see the same types of characters in each film. At least one of the women is a stick in the mud. In The Fabulous Four, that’s Sarandon’s job. As Lou, she’s a serious doctor who loves cats and is holding a grudge against Midler’s character over a long-ago offence. Often Keaton, with her turtlenecks, is the most uptight of her group. And Fonda, when she appears, plays sexually adventurous characters, prone to making off-colour jokes. Megan Mullally has that gig in Four, with an assist from the famously bawdy Midler. There are usually high jinks involving behaviour that one might not expect from seniors. They get high. They go on adventurous excursions like parasailing or ziplining. They experiment with technology and social media. (The Fabulous Four has a whole bit about Midler on TikTok.)
Men are in the mix, too, played by notable older actors – Don Johnson, Andy Garcia, Eugene Levy and Bruce Greenwood, to name a few – but never anyone quite as famous as the women around them. In fact, this run of older lady films has superseded the tradition of comedies that feature groups of acclaimed older male actors; think Grumpy Old Men, The Bucket List and Going in Style, both its original and its remake, classified by The New York Times as part of the “old-dudes-acting-up genre.”
The films starring women are generally light as air, even when they add some poignancy into the mix while grappling with health issues or the death of a spouse. Given the ages of the protagonists, the overarching messages tend to be about embracing life to the fullest, despite society telling you otherwise. And though the actresses involved are highly decorated, these movies rarely garner critical recognition, so why the influx?
“I think that people love these movies,” said Alex Saks, a producer who has worked on Book Club, Poms and Summer Camp. “Executives love these movies, and so whenever we’re given a reason to believe in them, people want to take it,”
The Book Club script first crossed Saks’ path about a decade ago when she was working as an agent. She said she was drawn to it in part because of her love of The First Wives Club, the 1996 comedy starring Midler, Keaton and Goldie Hawn as three divorced women scheming against their ex-husbands. The film is a predecessor of these projects in multiple ways, with a similar cast, that at that time, was already seen as older. They also owe their existence to the success of Nancy Meyers films like Something’s Gotta Give, which found Keaton engaging in late-in-life romance.
Saks believed in Book Club on a personal level, she said: “I knew that movies that were good like this could become iconic and re-watched the way that First Wives Club was.”
Filmmakers understand the appeal of projects like these, even when they aren’t necessarily the kind of film that would be in their wheelhouses. Take, for instance, the director of 80 for Brady, Kyle Marvin, who previously worked on indie films, like The Climb, which he starred in and co-wrote. Marvin told me his motivation for coming on board 80 for Brady was selfish. “It was a chance to work with legends,” he said. “Those women are hands down some of the greatest comedians of my childhood.”
Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse, who directed The Fabulous Four, had a similar sentiment. “The idea of working with actresses in that age group, which basically contains some absolute icons, got me very excited,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, if I could get somebody like Susan Sarandon or, amazingly, if I could ever get Bette Midler to do it, this would be incredible.’ And then they said yes.”
There’s also a belief among some in the industry that there’s an audience for these kinds of movies, and it’s willing to go to theatres to get its fix. That’s why independent film company Bleecker Street signed on to The Fabulous Four, the company’s president, Kent Sanderson, said in an interview.
“What makes something like this appeal to us as financiers and distributors, is that this is a movie we think a certain generation is going to want to go to to experience communally,” he said.
Though 80 for Brady was originally acquired by Paramount for streaming, Marvin said he was confident in its theatrical potential. “We were told as we started that that community wouldn’t show up because it was post-Covid,” Marvin said. “And they were saying theatre for this generation is dead. We really believe in theatrical and thought, ‘There’s no way that’s true.’”
80 for Brady didn’t come close to the haul of Book Club, also distributed by Paramount, which grossed over US$104 million ($174m) worldwide, but it did perform better than expected at the box office with a US$12.5m ($20.9m) opening weekend and an ultimate gross of over US$40m ($67m) worldwide. This isn’t the fate of all of these films, however. Summer Camp, released by Roadside, had a haul that was only a little over US$2m ($3.3m). Saks noted that the marketing budget for that movie was millions of dollars less than that for Book Club.
“You hope that word of mouth and all of it takes off, but I think post-Covid it’s harder and there’s a lot of distraction,” she said.
Diversion, however, is the intention behind these films. The directors I spoke with all insisted that while their movies touch on serious topics related to ageing, their main goal is goofiness. And they are certainly goofy; you can’t think too hard about any one detail because plot holes abound. In fact, Moorhouse admitted she chose not to overthink the fact that Mullally and Sheryl Lee Ralph are significantly younger than Midler and Sarandon, for instance. Instead, she just altered the screenplay so the characters didn’t all go to college together.
Even with those incongruities, it’s easy to see how there is something comforting about seeing these collections of faces on-screen, engaging in ridiculous behaviour.
“I think that it is important that we give screen time to, not only legendary ladies, but also to actors that are not your typical leading ladies anymore, people that look real, and that you can really believe and empathise with because the reality is we’re all going to be getting older,” said Castille Landon, director of Summer Camp. “It’s important that we see people having fun. It’s not rocket science.”
That’s how you end up with multiple musical numbers dropped into The Fabulous Four. Moorhouse thought: If you can, why not have Midler and Ralph harmonise?
“This is a fun, silly movie,” Moorhouse said. “I want people to have fun watching it. I certainly had fun making it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Esther Zuckerman
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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