Direction: Ol Parker
Cast: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Kaitlyn Dever, Billie Lourd, Lucas Bravo
Country: United States
Year: 2022
Release date: 09-09-2022
Genre: Romantic comedy
Screenplay: Daniel Pipski, Ol Parker
Duration: 105 min
Synopsis: A divorced couple come together and travel to Bali to try to prevent their madly in love daughter from making the same mistake she thinks they made 25 years ago.
As if the maxim of Prince Don Fabrizio Salina from ‘El gatopardo’, everything must change so that everything remains the same, had been marked by fire in the coat of arms of the romantic comedy since, to put a date, the times of ‘It Happened One Night’ (Frank Capra, 1934), in ‘Journey to Paradise’, the ‘It Happened One Night’ year 2022 of that Ol Parker to whom we owe the sweetened scripts everything must change so that everything remains the same The exotic ‘Hotel Marigold‘, sequel and ‘Mamma Mia‘.
Time and time again, the struggle of the sexes suits modern egalitarian times, although there is nothing modern about the ancient and effective comic game of the male character being the scapegoat (with or without sharp-toothed dolphins) in gags, something that Howard Hawks (the most feminine male director in Hollywood) patented in his comedies (and in his westerns). Because as much as it is intended according to a contemporary universe of the couple as something open or in danger of extinction not limited to marriage, ‘Journey to Paradise’ is deliciously old-fashioned (the two young marriageable people who generate the conflict are) in that respect as the best romantic comedies still are.
Ticket to paradise film trailer
Deliciously silly (what the Juan de Orduña of a camp comedy would say, yes, and romantic, too, with a feuding couple and a Caribbean setting) are Julia Roberts and George Clooney, the soul of a deliciously inconsequential and adorably predictable film. Watching them “hate” each other and play tricks on each other like Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant from ‘The Philadelphia Story’ to the rhythm of very well-written dialogues and retorts, betting on physical comedy and slapstick (the games at the party that make us want a new ‘Charada’ with the two of them as protagonists; the dances…) and even some unexpected but welcome moment of calm and bitter reflection on the failure of coexistence in common and the end of love (that conversation/confession that places Parker’s film very near another Stanley Donen as ‘Two for the road’).