Book Club: The Next Chapter Reviews

Bill Holderman and Erin Simms reunite on writing duties for Book Club: The Next Chapter, the sequel to their 2018 film Book Club. Holdeman once again directs the same lead and many of the same supporting actors, resulting in a fun film that caters to women but is pleasantly watchable by anyone.The pandemic is over, and the book club friends can reunite. The timing is excellent because Vivian (Jane Fonda) has a big announcement - she's finally getting married! This results in Vivian, Carol (Mary Steenburgen), Diane (Diane Keaton), and Sharon (Candice Bergen) ultimately agreeing that they should celebrate with a bachelorette's vacation in Italy. Since they'd always planned on touring that country together before, it is the perfect, and possibly final, chance for them to do so. The result is a three-day whirlwind tour with great wine, better food, adventures, misadventures, and more wine. Even though they've known each other for fifty years, the ladies still have some surprises up their sleeves for each other. At first glance, the film looks like another ladies-only story. On the surface, that is precisely what it is. But there is more to it than the simple misadventures of aging friends. Each is suffering from her own tragedies, and how the script is handled makes it a human story of friendship, loss, and growth. Even though they move quickly from scene to scene, it is often fluid and natural. They're on a very brief tour, so when they flit through, the audience moves right along with them without the haste seeming out of place. The four seasoned leads make the long-standing friendships organic - friendly insults, blunt truths, and a lot of book references inclusive. The cinematography is occasionally jerky, but that usually goes right along with the action and is probably intentional, if occasionally dizzying. The beautiful scenery of the friends' tour of Italy, which includes Rome, Venice, and Tuscany, makes up for it. However, like most of the rest of the film, they're on and gone pretty quickly.Book Club: The Next Chapter isn't a particularly high-minded story, nor does it pretend to be. Instead, it is a buddy film that doesn't overcomplicate the characters or make them caricatures of friendships. Instead, it opts to show the good-natured and often humorous side of relationships that have endured the test of time, successfully showing how individual pages in the women's lives bind them together.