Book Club: The Next Chapter review: star charisma shines

Book Club: The Next Chapter reunites Hollywood icons Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen as the four lifelong friends whose good-humored rapport and slightly bawdy antics turned 2018’s saucy romantic comedy Book Club into a box-office hit. 

That film saw the quartet adding spice and sizzle to their love lives after choosing Fifty Shades of Grey for the eponymous book club. This time around, however, it is not a novel but a romance of Italy that refreshes their spirits.

Before that, Book Club: The Next Chapter has to bring us up to speed with what has been going on in the lives of Fonda’s hotel owner Vivian, Keaton’s widowed Diane, Steenburgen's chef Carol, and Bergen’s divorced federal judge Sharon since we last saw them. The pandemic closed Carol’s restaurant for good, and it put paid to the friends' custom of hosting their literary get-togethers in one another’s lavish California homes. 

Lockdown forced the four to continue the book club via regular Zoom calls, and saw them resort to various time-filling new hobbies, from learning the accordion to pickling cucumbers. As for their reading, it appears that Sally Rooney’s Normal People failed to float their boats. And neither did AJ Finn’s best-selling agoraphobia thriller The Woman at the Window. "If I wanted to read a book about a woman trapped at home slowly going crazy I would have read my own diary," is Sharon’s take.

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist is, it seems, far more to their taste, and the cult novel’s theme of finding your destiny leads the friends to start spotting signs and omens all over the place. So when the commitment-phobic Vivian finally agrees to marry her re-ignited old flame Arthur (Don Johnson), it inspires the four to combine a trip to Italy—the fulfillment of a long-postponed dream vacation they had planned together half a century earlier—with her bachelorette party.

The well-heeled friends travel in quite some style and even though they run into a series of setbacks and mishaps as they journey to Rome, Venice, and Tuscany — many of them witnessed by veteran Italian star Giancarlo Giannini’s wry, seemingly omnipresent police chief — the Italian tourist board will be thrilled by the film’s glowing depiction of artworks, wine and sunsets. Italy has rarely looked lovelier.

To be honest, Book Club: The Next Chapter looks better than it sounds. The script (once again by director Bill Holderman and his co-writer Erin Simms) is peppered with clunky gags that would land with even more of a thud were it not for the charm of stars unafraid to take the joke on the chin. Early on, Keaton's typically scatty Diane mutes herself on Zoom and turns her screen image into a potato; later, Fonda’s Vivian says her face is "the work of many skilled artisans. They’re practically unionized". It’s clear that the stars are having fun — not least in the sequence in which they try on gorgeous wedding dresses during a private visit to an atelier in Rome — and there is something touchingly tender about their characters’ friendship.

Without Fonda, Keaton, and co, Book Club: The Next Chapter would be little more than an enjoyably glossy travelogue. The plot couldn’t be slighter. The stars’ chemistry and charisma are what make the film work. And in a cinematic landscape dominated by superhero movies, isn’t it surprising—and refreshing—to see four women of a certain age taking the limelight for a change?

Book Club: The Next Chapter his theaters on May 12, 2023.