Review: PALM BEACH

Members of a one hit wonder band from the '70s who have kept in touch gather for the birthday of their old manager. Everyone's married, had kids, known big highs and lows, and moved on. Or have they? This is a reunion comedy like The Big Chill or Peter's Friends and it does what it says on the tin. Buried emotional corpses are exhumed, young adult children are compared with parents who are having a very hard time coping with being older then they were when they were famous. You need to laugh and you need to cry and finally you need to feel the warm 'n' fuzzies wrap around you like the finest fake fur coat.

Well, all of that happens and is enacted by a cast of mighty actors from home and away like Bryan Brown, Greta Scacchi, Richard E. Grant, Sam Neill and fine newcomers like Claire Van Der Boom among many others. Everyone gets a scene to themselves and their defining issue and everyone does well with what they get. That is the problem: most of the trouble that emerges is given so little weight by the progress of the film that reactions to it almost always feel overdone. They appear suddenly by people who seem too well prepared to supply a turn. I don't mean that the truth of the situation is so strong that we're witnessing people who know each other too well. I mean that the writing seems too often to play placeholder scenes as final drafts. The actors are a lot better than their material.

There is one scene towards the end involving a taxi and it's perfectly written, performed and directed, going from bitterness and pathos to effortless comedy. It sticks out and shows up pretty much every other scene. There's a lot on show as far as performance goes, the delivery of wit, physical comedy, youth vs age but when one character's taunt to the birthday boy about a blot on the otherwise magnificent view, the last straw seems like nothing so the latter's acting makes him look like a drama queen having a coronary. There are some serious issues but they're so smoothed over that nothing really seems to be at stake. Even the physical comedy scenes lack power as they are of acts that might be funny if they happened in real life but not on screen. Again, the actors feel like they're over-reacting as though they're in a drama class.

It's not the fault of this film alone but of the genre that the darker aspects of ageing never get a look in. Mortality and personal power drain, resentment of youth could be worth exploring over fart jokes and wistful musings on what they used to be. There is just nothing unpredictable about these people. Reunions should be fraught with danger. There should be envy, ridicule, repeat bullying, pecking order reinstatement; all sorts of massive bullshit. If they were just nice no one would go to them.