“Lonely Planet,” the Netflix age-gap movie, is about a novelist
Romance films are meant to make you cheer for love—in fact, that’s sort of the entire point—but Netflix’s age-gap production “Lonely Planet,” which tells the story of a writer who is having creative block and falls in love with a guy 20 years her younger, does quite the opposite.
Overlapping vacation schedules and dull conversation thrust world-famous writer Katherine (Laura Dern) and handsome, boring finance bro Owen (Liam Hemsworth) into an acquaintanceship that develops into more, rather than fate, passion, or a deep soul-to-soul connection drawing its leads together like magnets. A relationship worthy of obsession? Not really. But I suppose it’s healthy for her?
As the stylish, successful Katherine, Dern radiates easy elegance. She has just been rejected and has come to a posh Moroccan writer’s retreat with the intention of hiding from her friends and finishing her long-overdue next book.
(Some of the most brutally realistic representations of writerhood in recent memory include how swiftly she hangs up on her agent’s warnings about deadlines and frantically looks for a quiet area to work in, only to fall blank with writer’s block.) The mismatch in their relationship is exacerbated by Owen’s low-level private equity guy status and Lily’s (Diana Silvers) literary success following him after a smash beach read.
You wonder why any woman would be drawn to a walking red flag, an inferiority problem, who spouts things like “2,500 acres of untapped coal is gonna be a solid investment” over breakfast and compares Dickens to Gladys Knight. The movie doesn’t really establish much, apart from the fact that Owen resembles Liam Hemsworth, who does his best to give him a compelling inner existence. “I find you to be very tolerable,” is one of Owen’s flirtatious and purportedly endearing phrases.
Despite Katherine’s lack of interest in a younger guy in finance, writer-director Susannah Grant’s screenplay constantly brings them together with the background of seductive North African locations.
The couple strolls and chats through Chefchaouen’s historic markets and blue corridors, oohing and aahing over the amiable locals who are voluntarily used as cultural set dressing for their “Eat, Pray, Love” adventure, and marvels at the transformative “new and exotic” life experiences they’re sharing in a foreign land that, for all intents and purposes of the plot, could be substituted for any other stunning filming location with a respectable tax incentive. What was intended to be a sweet sequence of getting-to-know-you montages starts to smell strongly of exploitation.
Grant has previously tackled off-center romances (“Ever After: A Cinderella Story” and “Catch and Release”); however, the most unconventional choice here may be the delayed gratification of having to wait until the final act to see how Katherine gets her groove back in one steamy, satisfying, wall-slamming rendezvous.
Grant received an Oscar nomination for writing “Erin Brockovich” and co-created the gutting crime drama miniseries “Unbelievable.” While this is going on, Pinar Toprak’s lush and dreamy score complements cinematographer Ben Smithard’s lovely, sun-soaked shots of “Lonely Planet”; these textures give Katherine and Owen’s story a more seductive romantic quality than their flimsy discussions about identity, purpose, and Owen’s high school football career.
“Lonely Planet” might have turned its idea into a more gratifying depiction of contemporary sex and romance between an older lady and her much younger partner if it had dared to defy the standards of the genre. (Owen’s last name, “Brophy,” is a clever combination of the words “bro” and “trophy,” implying a more sardonic edge than the movie really embraces.) Rather of building chemistry naturally, this sluggish love drama sells out its aspirationally cool and educated female heroine with an ending that she and the brilliant Dern barely deserve.
