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Couples Retreat (15)
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Dir. Peter Billingsley, US, 2009, 113 mins
Cast: Vince Vaughn, Jean Reno, Jason Bateman
Review by Carol Allen
The setting of the film is, as the title suggests, a retreat for couples whose relationships are in trouble. Which should have given some great opportunities for comic and ironic comment on American thirty something marrieds - their obsessions with work, material goods, technology and indeed couples therapy. Unfortunately the writer and the director in the main don't seize those opportunities.
Jason (Bateman) and Cynthia (Kristen Bell) are on the brink of divorce. They invite the other young marrieds in their group over to their place to announce the news via a powerpoint presentation, which appears to be obsessive/compulsive Jason's favourite means of communication. The group consists of Dave (Vaughan) and Ronnie (Malin Akerman), Joey (Jon Favreau) and Lucy (Kristen Davis) and Shane (Faizon Love), who's already split with his wife and has a new, much younger girlfriend Trudy (Kali Hawk). The powerpoint presentation turns into a commercial for Eden Resort, a tropical island paradise specialising in couples therapy. If they go as a group package, they get a cheaper rate - the only way Jason and Cynthia can afford it. Eventually the moral blackmail succeeds - "you guys are our only hope of saving out marriage". But when they arrive, they discover there's no opting out of the therapy as promised and the other three apparently functioning relationships also start to crumble under the attentions of the flaky therapists.
The outcome for the audience though is very occasionally funny and in places rather boring. The humour is somewhat on the lame side to put it mildly, rather than being adult, witty and perceptive, which is what the subject calls for. At times it's positively adolescent. It's certainly not the fault of the actors, most of whom have given many really good comedy performances in the past, particularly Vaughan and Bateman. They do their best but the material isn't up to their talents. The feistiest and most interesting characters are the three black ones - Shane, Trudy and Shane's estranged wife, who puts in an appearance towards the end. All the others are a bit of a pain; American versions of the sort of smug marrieds that Bridget Jones finds so annoying and definitely the sort of people with whom you would most not want to be stuck on a remote island, while poor Jean Reno tries hard as Marcel, the therapist who runs Eden and is the flakiest flake of all, but this is so not what he does best either.
There is though one serious point to make about the film, which is draped throughout with anorexic size minus zero women poncing about in bikinis, most notably Kristen Davies, who appears to have been living on mineral water and a lettuce leaf since her "Sex and the City" days and is now alarmingly thin. Not the best of role models for a certificate 15 film. The only normal sized womanly women are again the two black women.
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