Pack your bags, we'll leave tonight
In the 2001 masterpiece of big-budget studio fluff Ocean's Eleven, George Clooney and Julia Roberts co-starred as bickering ex-spouses, whose sharp-tongued acrimony was so clever and adorable and spiked with gorgeous movie star energy that one can barely stand the crashing force of all the chemistry between them. So we know they can do better than they're doing in Ticket to Paradise, where they co-star as bickering ex-spouses whose sharp-tongued acrimony mostly just serves as a grave reminder that sometimes divorce really is the only appropriate course of action.
This appalling lack of sparkle between two of our last Movie Stars with a capital M and capital S is pretty much a fatal strike for a movie that really never does much of anything to bring itself to life. Ticket to Paradise is the story of a pair of terribly bitter middle-aged people, the Cottons, art gallery owner Georgia (Roberts) and architect David (Clooney) who married 25 years ago, divorced 20 years ago, and have crossed paths in the intervening years only on behalf of their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), whom they both adore almost as much as they despise each other. Now, Lily has newly graduated from either undergrad or law school - it's extremely opaque as written and staged, but I think it's pretty clear that writers Ol Parker and Daniel Pipski meant for it to be the latter, and just keep calling it "college" for some bizarre reason - and to celebrate, has taken a several-week vacation in Bali with her low-functioning alcoholic buddy Wren (Billie Lourd), before returning to Chicago, where David lives still (Georgia fled to Los Angeles after the divorce), to start a fancy job at a fancy law firm. The only thing that could derail her plans would be to fall in a whirlwind romance with a Balinese local, Gede (Maxime Bouttier), and decide after a month to marry him and stay in Bali.
The romantic comedy, as a genre, asks us to swallow a ton of bullshit, and if we're going to have fun with such stories we had better do so with an eager smile, but Ticket to Paradise tripped over its feet right out of the gate for me: not for a millisecond do I buy that a person of Lily's background would decide, even as an impetuous 22-or-25-year-old feeling stressed out about starting a prestigious new job, would decided after one month to get married and move to Bali. I should say, her background such as we're given information about it; since one of the other lingering, film-killing problems with Ticket to Paradise is that none of these people are people. Oh, sure, Roberts and Clooney can keep giving winsome monologues about How It Was, and we can attempt to excavate some kind of meaning out of the facts that she's a gallery owner, he's an architect, and they gave birth to someone who could secure a job as a lawyer even before she had her degree in hand, but that's not at all the same thing as actually giving them identities, personalities, histories, contexts. They're just cogs in the story Parker and Pipski have grunted out, in which the estranged couple agrees to tolerate each other for four days in Bali, until such time as they're able to knock some sense into their daughter and take her back to the States. If you suspect that what will instead happen is that seeing each other again, and being surrounded by the exquisite beauty of the tropics, and seeing their daughter so happy for the first time in her life, will all conspire to make Georgia and David start to wonder if they might have made the wrong choice all those years ago, congratulations on being familiar with the human art form known as "dramatic narrative".
Ticket to Paradise doesn't even really tell that story. It relies on our knowledge that we're watching a romcom starring two major international celebrities to tell that story, but given the evidence presented onscreen, I can't imagine rooting for the Cottons to get back together, unless you're universally opposed to divorce on philosophical grounds. They do not seem to secretly love or like each other, and Roberts & Clooney's actual real-life friendship and their history of setting off fireworks as onscreen lovers are not even a tiny bit visible onscreen. Clooney, for his part, barely seems to be trying at all; it's one of the laziest performances I've ever seen him give, allowing the tired rhythms of the script's mossy jokes to give him an easy groove to drive along in, cracking the same one-liner about thirty times. Roberts is at least attempting to act, though I don't think she's really attempting to sell the story (perhaps she's attempting and failing), and I think close to 100% of what's pleasurable in Ticket to Paradise is thanks to her efforts.
And there is pleasure here, though goddamn little. Parker, who also directs, has managed to fuck up two things I would have thought were un-fuckable: the Roberts/Clooney onscreen pairing is one, the natural beauty of the southern Pacific is the other. Ticket to Paradise wasn't filmed in Bali, it was filmed in Queensland, but we have ample evidence that Queensland can be pretty damn beautiful onscreen as a stand-in for all sorts of Austronesian locales. Under the management of Parker and cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland, however, it looks kind of thin and desaturated, slightly overlit in a way that sucks the vitality and color out of everything. So that's a problem. Another is that it's not terribly funny, and rarely seems to be attempting to be funny; long stretches go by without any obvious "jokes" as such, unless it's inherently a joke for Clooney to act put-upon and huffy. But even much of the actual humor lands with a thud, crawling towards limp and obvious punchlines that you can see coming from basically the minute the scenario establishes itself. Not that it's any better when it's lively: the film opens with a cross-cutting sequence where David and Georgia both recap the history of their failed marriage to friends, and the way the conversation keeps hopping between the two of them is, I am sure, meant to be very punchy and energetic, and I'm sure editor Peter Lambert had a fun time putting it together. But it's messy nonsense that gets us into the story in the clunkiest way, as our two leads recite the most blatantly "let's do some exposition" style dialogue to characters who have zero function in the movie besides to receive that exposition, and the whole thing makes not even a tiny bit of sense spatially. Which is par for the course with the editing in modern studio comedies, and I guess I should be grateful that I only caught Ticket to Paradise crossing the 180-degree line once in its 104 minutes.
It's so flat, this movie, not even egregiously bad, unless making Queensland look like shit counts. It's generic as hell, with anonymous characters moving through a boilerplate plot that seems incredibly anxious to make sure that there's no room for emotional buy-in by making the central conflict so hollow and contrived, built around a whirlwind romance that seems destined to end in tears, no matter how much the "fun" endting tries to convince us otherwise. The hook here is very obviously meant to be "but, but, George and Julia!" and if that's enough for you, great, I guess. With Clooney sleepwalking and Roberts not really trying to wake him up, it absolutely wasn't enough for me.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
This appalling lack of sparkle between two of our last Movie Stars with a capital M and capital S is pretty much a fatal strike for a movie that really never does much of anything to bring itself to life. Ticket to Paradise is the story of a pair of terribly bitter middle-aged people, the Cottons, art gallery owner Georgia (Roberts) and architect David (Clooney) who married 25 years ago, divorced 20 years ago, and have crossed paths in the intervening years only on behalf of their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), whom they both adore almost as much as they despise each other. Now, Lily has newly graduated from either undergrad or law school - it's extremely opaque as written and staged, but I think it's pretty clear that writers Ol Parker and Daniel Pipski meant for it to be the latter, and just keep calling it "college" for some bizarre reason - and to celebrate, has taken a several-week vacation in Bali with her low-functioning alcoholic buddy Wren (Billie Lourd), before returning to Chicago, where David lives still (Georgia fled to Los Angeles after the divorce), to start a fancy job at a fancy law firm. The only thing that could derail her plans would be to fall in a whirlwind romance with a Balinese local, Gede (Maxime Bouttier), and decide after a month to marry him and stay in Bali.
The romantic comedy, as a genre, asks us to swallow a ton of bullshit, and if we're going to have fun with such stories we had better do so with an eager smile, but Ticket to Paradise tripped over its feet right out of the gate for me: not for a millisecond do I buy that a person of Lily's background would decide, even as an impetuous 22-or-25-year-old feeling stressed out about starting a prestigious new job, would decided after one month to get married and move to Bali. I should say, her background such as we're given information about it; since one of the other lingering, film-killing problems with Ticket to Paradise is that none of these people are people. Oh, sure, Roberts and Clooney can keep giving winsome monologues about How It Was, and we can attempt to excavate some kind of meaning out of the facts that she's a gallery owner, he's an architect, and they gave birth to someone who could secure a job as a lawyer even before she had her degree in hand, but that's not at all the same thing as actually giving them identities, personalities, histories, contexts. They're just cogs in the story Parker and Pipski have grunted out, in which the estranged couple agrees to tolerate each other for four days in Bali, until such time as they're able to knock some sense into their daughter and take her back to the States. If you suspect that what will instead happen is that seeing each other again, and being surrounded by the exquisite beauty of the tropics, and seeing their daughter so happy for the first time in her life, will all conspire to make Georgia and David start to wonder if they might have made the wrong choice all those years ago, congratulations on being familiar with the human art form known as "dramatic narrative".
Ticket to Paradise doesn't even really tell that story. It relies on our knowledge that we're watching a romcom starring two major international celebrities to tell that story, but given the evidence presented onscreen, I can't imagine rooting for the Cottons to get back together, unless you're universally opposed to divorce on philosophical grounds. They do not seem to secretly love or like each other, and Roberts & Clooney's actual real-life friendship and their history of setting off fireworks as onscreen lovers are not even a tiny bit visible onscreen. Clooney, for his part, barely seems to be trying at all; it's one of the laziest performances I've ever seen him give, allowing the tired rhythms of the script's mossy jokes to give him an easy groove to drive along in, cracking the same one-liner about thirty times. Roberts is at least attempting to act, though I don't think she's really attempting to sell the story (perhaps she's attempting and failing), and I think close to 100% of what's pleasurable in Ticket to Paradise is thanks to her efforts.
And there is pleasure here, though goddamn little. Parker, who also directs, has managed to fuck up two things I would have thought were un-fuckable: the Roberts/Clooney onscreen pairing is one, the natural beauty of the southern Pacific is the other. Ticket to Paradise wasn't filmed in Bali, it was filmed in Queensland, but we have ample evidence that Queensland can be pretty damn beautiful onscreen as a stand-in for all sorts of Austronesian locales. Under the management of Parker and cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland, however, it looks kind of thin and desaturated, slightly overlit in a way that sucks the vitality and color out of everything. So that's a problem. Another is that it's not terribly funny, and rarely seems to be attempting to be funny; long stretches go by without any obvious "jokes" as such, unless it's inherently a joke for Clooney to act put-upon and huffy. But even much of the actual humor lands with a thud, crawling towards limp and obvious punchlines that you can see coming from basically the minute the scenario establishes itself. Not that it's any better when it's lively: the film opens with a cross-cutting sequence where David and Georgia both recap the history of their failed marriage to friends, and the way the conversation keeps hopping between the two of them is, I am sure, meant to be very punchy and energetic, and I'm sure editor Peter Lambert had a fun time putting it together. But it's messy nonsense that gets us into the story in the clunkiest way, as our two leads recite the most blatantly "let's do some exposition" style dialogue to characters who have zero function in the movie besides to receive that exposition, and the whole thing makes not even a tiny bit of sense spatially. Which is par for the course with the editing in modern studio comedies, and I guess I should be grateful that I only caught Ticket to Paradise crossing the 180-degree line once in its 104 minutes.
It's so flat, this movie, not even egregiously bad, unless making Queensland look like shit counts. It's generic as hell, with anonymous characters moving through a boilerplate plot that seems incredibly anxious to make sure that there's no room for emotional buy-in by making the central conflict so hollow and contrived, built around a whirlwind romance that seems destined to end in tears, no matter how much the "fun" endting tries to convince us otherwise. The hook here is very obviously meant to be "but, but, George and Julia!" and if that's enough for you, great, I guess. With Clooney sleepwalking and Roberts not really trying to wake him up, it absolutely wasn't enough for me.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: joyless mediocrity, romcoms, travelogues, unfunny comedies
