Do you remember your wedding? I sure remember mine … making everybody take an expensive 20-hour plane ride to an impossibly remote island paradise … my ridiculously good-looking estranged parents fighting constantly except for the part when they intervened, were exceptionally rude, and embarrassed themselves all to stop our wedding …gosh, and remember when we got in a couples beer pong drinking contest as a substitute for a rehearsal dinner? Good times.
Oh wait. That wasn’t my wedding. My wedding was in a golf clubhouse while it rained outside. My not-so-ridiculously-good-looking parents stopped at a local AAA office to get maps … because my dad really likes maps. What I described above was instead, of course, the plot of Ticket to Paradise.
So this is a film in which recent undergraduate? Graduate? Law student? Lily Cotton (Kaitlyn Dever) visits Bali, finds her love, drags her parents there just a month later for her wedding … and, yet, almost none this film is about Lily. Aiming squarely at an audience of glamour-struck middle-agers, Ticket to Paradise wanted you to know that whatever your newly adult children are going through, this is about you.
Long divorced couple David and Georgia (George Clooney and Julia Roberts) can’t stop fighting. It’s probably why they divorced. Luckily, they don’t see each other very often. Lily’s graduation from, clearly, some sort of school (the script was quite hazy on all of this –Lily is presented as an overachiever and headed for a job in a top law firm, which suggests law student. However, her fellow graduate Wren is ambitiousless and talks about graduating “after four years.” There’s also the part where Lily tosses her entire career away without even returning to the states. Nobody, but nobody, puts in three grueling years at law school, breaks her ass to land and pass the bar, just to be a housewife in Indonesia.) I digress; this film is not about Lily. David and Georgia can’t stop sniping at each other when they’re together, but they agree that Lily’s Bali wedding has to be stopped because Lily is “throwing her life away” just like they did.
I dunno how many times we’re gonna see Julia Roberts try to break up a wedding, but you’d think she’d be better at it by now, right?
The film sets up several situations in which David and Georgia are forced to occupy the same space with similarly bad goals in mind even though they don’t get along. Admittedly, it’s difficult not to like George Clooney; it is similarly difficult not to like Julia Roberts. It gets easier when they bicker, and easier still when the plot has them steal the wedding rings.
I can’t help but think of what a giant waste this film is – here you are given the gift of two Oscar-winning megastars and
filming location of “Bali” (actually it’s Queensland, Australia, but still, it’s very pretty) and then you have them behave like children. Meanwhile, you spend almost no time exploring how their daughter got to her decision, nor what her life will truly be like in Bali with seaweed farmer Gede (Maxime Bouttier). The phrase “ugly American” doesn’t begin to describe what goes on in this film.
Adding to multitude of things that were worth exploring but nobody bothered doing so is the film’s theme “Why wait?” `As if to imply whatever can be indulged and enjoyed may as well be indulged and enjoyed right away. People, this is the theme of addicts and the prematurely destitute. “Why wait?” is the credo of privilege; it doesn’t apply to anybody who has had to work for anything. Even in the context of the plot of the film, David and Georgia both admit their marriage failed because of a “Why wait?’ indulgence.
*sigh*
Look, George Clooney and Julia Roberts will always make me smile. They’re lovely screen people. They’ll improve anything they’re in … which makes me shudder to think exactly how bad Ticket to Paradise could have been.
A couple for many years separated
Found a wedding left them both frustrated
So they went to Bali
To conclude this folly
And discovered only issues they created
Rated PG-13, 104 Minutes
Director: Ol Parker
Writer: Ol Parker, Daniel Pipski (that can’t be the surname of a real life grown man, can it?)
Genre: The prettiest and wittiest of the world of Karens
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People into megastars
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People into plot
