Summer Camp Movie Review

Shot at a boomers reunion, it is another outing for writer-director Castille Landon, with Eugene Levy and Dennis Haysbert also starring.

Should Hollywood want to lure older people – who have been among the most faithful friends of cinema and who patronise less than their younger counterparts these days – back to the multiplex by redoubling its attentions on the over-50 set, here’s a cipher – from the so-so to the seriously, erratically so-bad – as to what works (they cast Eugene Levy!), and more importantly, what most assuredly does not – efforts at wacky disorientation saturated in enforced thinness. Zipping here and there between strained slapstick and thoughtfully scripted tête-à-têtes, this boomer-centric reunion comedy finds a well-meaning and capable cast of septuagenarian professionals – Alan Arkin, Christopher Lloyd, Kenan Thompson, Sally Field – stranded in a mostly laugh-free zone of zip lines and trite setups.

Dialogues in the screenplay by its director, Castille Landon, often ring true but add up to nothing like momentum. Landon, whose previous films include the Katherine Heigl vehicle Fear of Rain and two of the After movies, a series of female-oriented romances, does get some things right in this story of three lifelong friends who reunite at the sleepaway camp where they first met. The friends are played by Diane Keaton (who also serves as a producer), Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard. The setting, Camp Pinnacle, is the real scenic place of the same name in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

During a flashback scène, we learn why such a trio of outcast Pinnacle day campers became interconnected in the first place: protectorate Nora (Taylor Madeline Hand), new-age pacifist Mary (Audrianna Lico) and slightly older, sexier but still wholesome Ginny (Kensington Tallman) had each other’s backs. Together, they endure the bulldog of predatory insults from Pinnacle’s bondage-bra-and-hotpants wearing social monitors, Pinnacle’s answer to The Plastics, and called the Pretty Committee in their 2018 selves by Beverly D’Angelo, Victoria Rowell and Maria Howell.

Not only does this set-up tell us who the three central women are to each other, but it also gives us the movie’s central conceit: that it could, indeed, be 50 years later, and they are, mostly, basically, their tween selves. The reunion in their old summertime lair could be sweet and stupid and sad. For amid all this busy-busy, there are little glimpses of each woman’s inner kiddo.

The trouble is, everyone here is, in no uncertain terms, one thing, and that thing needs fixing. Keaton’s widowed executive is an overworkaholic, Woodard’s married emergency-room nurse is manifestly, tellingly self-denying and overdone, and Bates’ Ginny has apparently converted her career-woman take-charge worldliness into an ostensibly self-help empire (with an aggressively smug branding, to boot: ‘Get Your Shit Together’ – a catchphrase that is, in all likelihood, going to blow back on her) that threatens to leave her just as misguidedly bossy as that vocalising massage lady.

No matter how complex the underlying thought processes, Bates and Woodard can each condense a world of nuance into a flick of the wrist, a flicker of the eyes, while Keaton’s pea-brained waffle here seems to have ossified into mere distraction, the equal of gallows humour: could this Nora be a CEO? By contrast the moments when Nora’s breath catches and her mask cracks become all the more effective because they pierce the pattern.

With a shrillily named bookings bus, her bestselling tote bag in hand, Ginny bullies Mary and Nora, who haven’t caught up with each other in years, to ‘Team Pinnacle!’ at Camp Pinnacle’s new week-long reunion, which becomes the first fundamental shift in the plot and the first of many truths. She’s the girl who ‘had fries with that’ But, oh, the other guillotine drops! A neurotic glamping-grade bunkhouse – the low-cost set design is by Scott Daniel – is the first misfit (and truth).

Dropping names and sex-toy gifties along with unwanted advice, Ginny doesn’t shrink from words, and she isn’t shy of them. ‘You seem to be hiding behind quite a few socially acceptable hashtags,’ she tells D’Angelo’s Jane — a good diagnosis not only of a narcissistically appearance-minded protagonist, but of a virtue-signalling age. Landon’s screenplay sidelines a few mock-savage swipes at self-help in general, and at sacred cows that the drama has targeted before.

But Nora’s tween hunk – the ‘whip-smart’ Stevie D (Levy) – and Mary’s – the ‘handsome as hell’ Tommy (Dennis Haysbert, who at 69 is the youngster in the central cast, even if only by a few days at the time of the movie’s release) – also appears at the party, conveniently single and sweetly reigniting those teenage passions.

There is not much for Haysbert to do here other than provide some smoothly resonant depth to his vocals and radiate good-guy radiation; he does both marvellously, especially in a scene with Woodard that might be the goofiest comic high point of the softcore sci-fi décolletage: an almost silent moment at an old-fashioned pottery wheel, the tactile connection and the awkward joy, not to mention the phallic symbolism — all nicely delineated by the cinematographer Karsten Gopinath.

And, against Nora’s neurotic dedication to proprietary technology – manifested in her pitiful urgency to ‘get it up and running again’ – Levy’s ex-corporate executive contrasts with a relatively newly adopted worldview of ‘work-life balance’. Even more so than this, the slowing, ebbing intensity of his line readings bring the film’s halting, lurching energy to a still point, a moving stillness.

Landon’s penchant for reaction-shot thrust-and-parry, in which the off-screen player can’t provide the beat, makes many sequences too on-edge to be comfortable, and too unfocused to be revealing. When the fire dies down, Summer Camp has room to breathe, room to find its heart and its mettle — in a conversation late at night between the three friends about loneliness, romance and autonomy, and in the would-be couple’s coterminous discreet heart-to-hearts. The comedy cuts, too.

As for the camp staff, sweet-sincere Josh Peck plays Jimmy, a young counsellor looking to find his purpose in life. Overseing the reunion activities is Sage, a barely-there Zelig of New Age bliss, played by a painfully game Nicole Richie, offering little zones of mellow WiFi against the full-bandwidth craziness of her woo-hooing lackey, Vick, who is played by Betsy Sodaro, evoking a mixture of Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids and Sam Kinison.

In between its many, many minutes of unfunny physical silly-stuff, its cartoonish disasters, and its chase-filled, crisis-filled, tension-filled plot-points that offer both maximum melodrama and minimum suspense, Tom Howe’s Chirpy-McChirpy score assures us that we will be absolutely fine. But along the way, there are yet more appealing zingers, wise-cracks and disparaging remarks from Ginny herself, and with every cutting line, including the ones she directs towards the briefly unhappy bride, Mary (and the only one on the trip with an actual treasure trove of troubles), we know that, even if she’s not always right, she must almost always be right most times. We know that because Landon has so sanitised Mary’s (remarkably uncomplicated) dilemma, making her husband such a transparently inept jerk and so flagrantly wrong for her.

And as sharp as Bates makes Ginny’s egocentrism and hauteur, she likewise nails how moving she is in exhorting women – friends and strangers alike – not to settle. To Landon’s credit, she stops short of a romantic ‘happy ending’ for this ragin’, self-made and very single woman.

After all, that’s nature’s way; it’s nature’s way to, every now and then, have sharks. But really, Summer Camp never reneges on expectations. It goes exactly where you expect it to go. And along the way, it has a couple of truly impressive gags and a bunch of stinkers. When the big inexorable food fight finally breaks out, it’s either an Animal House callback or, per the description of Stevie D, a Three Stooges situation. Either way, you might be inclined to begin following him toward the exit.