Lively Couples a Modest Comedic Retreat
After supposedly the supposedly happy couple Jason (Jason Bateman) and Cynthia (Kristen Bell) announce to their friends they are contemplating a divorce they quickly follow that shocking proclamation up by asking everyone to accompany them to a tropical resort so they can hopefully sort out their problems. They need the whole lot to go so they can get a fantastic group rate, promising their friends that while they engage in therapy everyone else can jet ski, lie out in the sun and otherwise enjoy themselves.
Malin Ackerman, Vince Vaughn and Jean Reno in Universal Pictures' Couples Retreat
After Dave (Vince Vaughn) and Ronnie (Malin Ackerman) find someone to baby-sit the kids and sign on, fellow friends Joey (Jon Favreau) and his former High School sweetheart wife Lucy (Kristin Davis) and Shane (Faizon Love) and his 20-year-old girlfriend Trudy (newcomer Kali Hawk) quickly sign up for the trip as well. But what was supposed to be fun in the sun for some suddenly turns into collective group therapy for all, each couple trying to figure out if this ‘vacation’ is designed to bring them closer together or separate them from one another’s arms for good.
Working from a script co-written by Vaughn, Favreau and Dana Fox (What Happens in Vegas), the comedy Couples Retreat is an intriguing combination of laughs and smarts I mostly responded to. Not only does the dialogue have that trademark Swingers zip, much like the criminally underrated The Break-Up the movie actually asks some tough questions about relationships without expecting any easy answers to make them palatable. For a great deal of its running time it is raw, uncompromising and very, very funny, and even when things hit a dry spell I was still moved and amused enough to not particularly care.
But those dry spells do start to add up after awhile, and where the first 80-percent or so show a remarkable narrative fearlessness the final act is so sugar-coated and saccharine it can’t help but be a bit disappointing. I wanted the filmmakers, including first-time director (and one-time A Christmas Story star) Peter Billingsley), to show some guts, understanding that audiences would understand if everything in the end wasn’t tied up in a pretty bow screaming they all lived happily ever after.
Maybe the couples do go on like they just stepped out of a fairy tale, but even if that were true that doesn’t mean all problems can disappear almost as if they never were there to begin with. What’s even more frustrating is that the climax hinted at is just about perfect, testifying to a kind of unselfish love everyone who has ever been in a committed relationship could easily relate.
Still, it must be stated that this movie made me smile. I loved the group’s early reactions to their therapeutic leader (a perfectly cast Jean Reno), while many of the individual couple’s therapy sessions both tickled my funny bone and ripped away little pieces of my heart both at the same time. Certain moments stood out winningly, the balance between comedy, drama and tragedy an almost ingenious tightrope walk that left me completely captivated.
A movie like this is only as good as its ensemble, and the one here comes extremely close to being priceless. A little unsurprisingly (considering Vaughn and Favreau are the primary creators behind the film), the men get a bit brighter a spotlight than do the women. They get the majority of the best lines and the more hysterical moments, all four of them working off one another with a relaxed ease Ackerman et al just can’t match.
I will say Davis has a couple of great bits, some of her glances and glares thrown Favreau’s way extremely strong. I also found Ackerman and Vaughn’s chemistry to be pretty much without par, while Bell easily has the film’s strongest moment of honest reflection delivering a short speech that came close to knocking my socks all the way off.
Unfortunately, it is that moment where things start to go frustratingly wrong. I could handle the haphazard pacing and the continual shifts in tone, what I couldn’t quite stomach was the film’s inability to remain as honest with its characters at the end as it had managed to do for the majority of the narrative. It’s a problem, new characters zapping in at the last possible second while others introduced earlier start behaving so out of type I started to wonder if they’d been possessed by a soul-sucking body snatcher.
Despite all of this I still feel reasonably warm and fuzzy towards Couple Retreat. The movie made me laugh, got me to think and showed a refreshing honesty that seldom condescended. It spoke about love and relationships in a ways Hollywood productions are deathly afraid of to emulate, and if not for a finale that left a whole heck of a lot to be desired I’d have rated this comedy as a tropical treat well worth savoring.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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