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Lonely Planet
Despite a lovely performance from Oscar winner Laura Dern, 2024's Lonely Planet, is a picturesque, but beyond dull romantic drama that doesn't work because of lack of chemistry between the stars and a story that takes WAY too long to get where we know it's going about 15 minutes into the film.
The setting is a writers' retreat in Morocco where we meet Katherine Lowe (Dern), a renowned writer who is in the process of ending of a 14-year old relationship and is experiencing writer's block who comes to the retreat for the solitude she thinks will help her complete her book. She accidently meets Owen Brophy (Liam Hemsworth), a high powered businessman who has come to the retreat to support his girlfriend, Lily (Diana Silvers) who is flush in the success of her very first novel and we see how Owen gets Katherine to look up from her computer and drift into an affair.
Director and writer Susannah Grant, who wrote the screenplay for Erin Brockovich, has mounted a story on an absolutely gorgeous canvas. The Moroccan setting is appealing but the film spends way too much time depending on scenery to entice the viewer. It reminded me a bit of the Katharine Hepburn drama Summertime that spent way too much time just creating a cinematic postcard that becomes tiresome after twenty minutes and when you have a movie with a running time of 1 hour and twenty-eight, minutes, we really don't need to spend so much time on atmosphere.
The first meeting between Katherine and Owen is a little contrived, but I liked the way the way Owen and Lily do begin to drift away. Lily's unintentional pushing Owen away is quite realistic as she spends more and more time with these pretentious and boring writers who are all in love with the sounds of their own voices . The scene where it climaxes at a party game where participants have to guess literary items and Lily ridicules Owen for not knowing who the character is might be my favorite scene in the film. Oddly, it's still another 30 minutes before Katherine and Owen begin to get physical and after all the waiting we've been doing, this too gets stalled, not to mention a really stupid 11:00 twist that appears to pull Katherine and Owen apart permanently.
Laura Dern works very hard at keeping the film watchable, even with the economic running time, has a hard time doing so, a lot of it having to do with the fact that she and serious eye candy Liam Hemsworth have absolutely no chemistry. As long as we wait for something to happen between these two, when it finally does, it's just not as interesting as we hoped it might be. For hardcore Dern fans only.
Despite a lovely performance from Oscar winner Laura Dern, 2024's Lonely Planet, is a picturesque, but beyond dull romantic drama that doesn't work because of lack of chemistry between the stars and a story that takes WAY too long to get where we know it's going about 15 minutes into the film.
The setting is a writers' retreat in Morocco where we meet Katherine Lowe (Dern), a renowned writer who is in the process of ending of a 14-year old relationship and is experiencing writer's block who comes to the retreat for the solitude she thinks will help her complete her book. She accidently meets Owen Brophy (Liam Hemsworth), a high powered businessman who has come to the retreat to support his girlfriend, Lily (Diana Silvers) who is flush in the success of her very first novel and we see how Owen gets Katherine to look up from her computer and drift into an affair.
Director and writer Susannah Grant, who wrote the screenplay for Erin Brockovich, has mounted a story on an absolutely gorgeous canvas. The Moroccan setting is appealing but the film spends way too much time depending on scenery to entice the viewer. It reminded me a bit of the Katharine Hepburn drama Summertime that spent way too much time just creating a cinematic postcard that becomes tiresome after twenty minutes and when you have a movie with a running time of 1 hour and twenty-eight, minutes, we really don't need to spend so much time on atmosphere.
The first meeting between Katherine and Owen is a little contrived, but I liked the way the way Owen and Lily do begin to drift away. Lily's unintentional pushing Owen away is quite realistic as she spends more and more time with these pretentious and boring writers who are all in love with the sounds of their own voices . The scene where it climaxes at a party game where participants have to guess literary items and Lily ridicules Owen for not knowing who the character is might be my favorite scene in the film. Oddly, it's still another 30 minutes before Katherine and Owen begin to get physical and after all the waiting we've been doing, this too gets stalled, not to mention a really stupid 11:00 twist that appears to pull Katherine and Owen apart permanently.
Laura Dern works very hard at keeping the film watchable, even with the economic running time, has a hard time doing so, a lot of it having to do with the fact that she and serious eye candy Liam Hemsworth have absolutely no chemistry. As long as we wait for something to happen between these two, when it finally does, it's just not as interesting as we hoped it might be. For hardcore Dern fans only.