“Poms” is a comedy about a group of women who form a cheerleading squad at their retirement community, proving that you’re never too old to ‘bring it!’
The recent success of Bill Holderman’s “Book Club” demonstrates that there’s a drastic shortage of Hollywood films targeting the 60+ female demographic. “Book Club” relied heavily on an ensemble of screen legends and a forcefully reassuring/amicable vibe to eclipse its lazy writing and predictability. And hey – it clearly worked, with crowds rushing to theaters, just glad to see their peers represented on the silver screen. Now comes Zara Hayes’ latest entry into the sexa/septua/octagenarian sub-genre, “Poms” (“from the producer of ‘Book Club’”), whose flaccid plot does little to advance it, with clichés that were already clichés back when its stars began their careers.
Martha (Diane Keaton) is dying of cancer. Having sold off all of her possessions, she moves into a retirement community, where she’s encouraged to join or start a club. Despondent and misanthropic at first, Martha soon meets her poker-playing, mischievous neighbor Sheryl (Jacki Weaver) and has a swift change of heart, deciding to form a cheerleading squad. Of course, they encounter challenges – opposition from the powers that be, broken bones, heartache – yet, unless you’ve never seen a movie (the film’s madly enthusiastic press screening audience evidently belonged to this group), you’ll groan at all the gags and see the outcome before the opening credits stop rolling.
“Poms” lurches from scene to scene with little explanation for its characters’ motivations and sudden behavioral changes. What exactly prompted the rigid Martha – whose background remains obscure – to suddenly open up and go out with a bang? Why does the retirement community’s welcoming administrator (Celia Weston) turn against the ladies so vehemently? I won’t even go into the painfully tacked-on subplots involving one of the women’s grandsons (Charlie Tahan) and a high school cheerleader with a heart of gold (Alisha Boe). Shane Atkinson’s script strains so hard to appease its demo by ticking all the prerequisite boxes, you can hear the film’s bones cracking under pressure. How ironic, that a supposedly subversive film is so utterly rudimentary, its supposedly nonconformist heroines such total archetypes.
Even Diane Keaton, normally luminous in the most middling of films, looks tired here, her phoned-in performance so strained it threatens to obliterate any semblance of good-naturedness the film tries so hard to achieve. Poor Pam Grier – who for some reason is third-billed – gets the shit end of the stick, delegated to maybe five mediocre lines; it’s as if her storyline were edited out of the final version. Rhea Perlman has a few smile-inducing moments as the maybe-murderous rascal but, again, her character is too underdeveloped to resonate. The only highlight really comes from Jacki Weaver’s vibrant Sheryl, the actress forming the much-needed heart of the film.
While Hollywood is slowly waking up to the fact that older audiences are starved for entertainment (there’s “The Bucket List,” “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” “Last Vegas,” um, “And So It Goes”…), there needs to be more films aimed at and featuring older women. “Poms”’ intentions are honorable – it just happens to pander to a demo that deserves better than this.
In theaters Friday, May 10th
