Review: The Boynton Beach Club

Going into The Boynton Beach Club, a little indie making its way around the country, I knew that its plot would be every bit as shallow and lighthearted as it looked on paper. The film centers on the lives of several members of a Florida retirement community coping with loss and rediscovering love and passion in their lives. Its premise is entirely elementary, to be sure. But, before seeing it, I had the hope that The Boynton Beach Club would be able to shed some much-needed cinematic light on the pleasures and pains of old-age. As recycled as its ideas may have been, perhaps it would be able to seize upon the freshness of a rare-explored demographic of characters—I thought to myself.

Unfortunately, the movie is as typical as Frozen Cherry Pie. It is the same old romantic-comedy that mainstream movie-going audiences have been bombarded with for the past decade, the one that they keep slapping themselves for paying ten dollars to see for the bigillionth time. The characters in The Boynton Beach Club may be elderly, but they’re every bit as shallow, hollow, and conventional as those in any movie that has ever starred Hugh Grant, Sandra Bullock, or Julia Roberts. I suppose viewers of the same age as the characters might be able to identify with the film, but does anybody really need to watch another jumbled, syrupy picture about finding oneself? Save yourself the time, which is better spent watching re-runs of “Oprah” covering the same territory anyway.