One of the many wonderfully fractious moments of Anjelica Huston’s staggeringly unfiltered interview with Vulture saw her openly and unashamedly take a brutal shot at cheerleading retirees comedy Poms. Low-hanging fruit it might be but that didn’t stop the actor calling it “apologetically humble” and “humiliating” which led to Jacki Weaver, one of the film’s stars, telling her to “go fuck herself” for being “mean and petty”. An unusual lack of restraint has made it one of the juiciest Hollywood feuds of late and when the dust settles, it’ll probably be the only thing anyone will remember about Poms, a crushingly useless bit of froth that struggles to deliver even the basest of pleasures.
There’s a familiar yet potentially satisfying formula set out here, a chain of events we know well yet one that’s geared toward pleasing a wide audience – and what’s frustrating about Poms is just how many times it misses such easy targets. It’s the tale of Martha (Diane Keaton) who’s packing up her life to move from New York down to Georgia to live in a retirement community after finding out that she has terminal cancer. She’s unimpressed by what she finds, a cloying, cliquey atmosphere that doesn’t fit her cynical city-born attitude. But she soon makes a friend in the form of her feisty neighbour Sheryl (Jacki Weaver) and together they start a cheerleading group.
The script, from first-time writer Shane Atkinson, barely even feels like a script, reading more like a very rough outline for a script, providing the bones but failing to add any meat. Scenes are perfunctory and flat, characters are thin and anonymous and dialogue is without insight or real humour. There’s a strange absence of fizz, a suffocating lifelessness taking hold of a film that should be charming us into submission. The laughs don’t erupt, the tears don’t fall and, most problematically, the cheers don’t come. There’s forced jubilance in place of anything genuine.
Despite the loose familiarity of the plot, there remains a wealth of material for Atkinson to explore, from issues of age and gender to questions of mortality and quality of life, but there’s precious little interest in diving underneath the film’s lazy, superficial surface. British director Zara Hayes appears aware of the script’s many weaknesses and tries to distract us with a seemingly endless set of familiar musical cues but there’s no amount of noise that can overpower the creaking sound of an underpowered story. Why would a hard-edged New Yorker move to a soft, southern retirement community? Why would she then be surprised by what she inevitably finds? Why would she really start a cheerleading group? Why would the film’s antagonist, a wasted Celia Weston, really care about destroying it? Why does any of this matter?
Leaps are made, minds are changed, details are scarce – it’s a first draft masquerading as a finished product. Atkinson does manage a handful of decent moments, such as the women exhaustively listing their medical conditions before their first practice or Keaton drinking through her secretive cancer diagnosis, but they’re fleeting and soon steamrolled by yet another boring, empty moment, devoid of energy or wit. Keaton is a pro and manages to successfully sleepwalk through the film, although it’s a shame we don’t get to see more from her given that the melancholic subplot could have hit harder. Weaver is a rare sign of life even if her Manic Pixie Dream Gran routine starts to grate rather fast. Elsewhere, no one is allowed any depth beyond the fact that they’re old and they’re female, with Rhea Perlman and Pam Grier left with nothing to do but shake their poms.
It’s easy to praise the mere existence of Poms as a rare wide-releasing comedy populated by women over the age of 70 but rather than feeling inspired, I left the cinema feeling depressed. Huston’s barb might have seemed mean-spirited but her words came from an understandable place of frustration over one of cruelty, the words of a talented, Oscar-winning actor glumly surveying an unfair and bleak industry landscape. The women in Poms deserve better and so do we.
Poms is out in the US on 10 May and in the UK later this year
