‘Ticket To Paradise’: Review

Dir. Ol Parker. US. 2022. 104 mins.

Charitably, you could call Ticket To Paradise cheerfully retro. It aims to take classic Hollywood screwball comedies, drop in Father Of The Bride (to become ‘Squabbling Divorced Parents Of The Bride’) and blend it with a distinct Working Title sensibility in a fake Bali recreated on Australia’s Gold Coast. And coast it does, on the good-humoured pairing of George Clooney and Julia Roberts, aiming at 80s and 90s audiences who will be startled to see their toothy, gray-ing matinee idols as parents of a twenty-something law graduate. Tempis fugit, for them, perhaps, but never for this kind of easy-breezy-beautiful studio film.

There’s a whole sub-industry based on wedding films, and Working Title is a pro at them

Uncharitably, perhaps, you could also call Ticket To Paradise smug and, in its depiction of Balinese society as tropical set dressing, hopelessly out of step with the times. The target audience will have to be re-established for this type of cozy cinema post-pandemic when it opens first in international markets before returning to the US in October. With the blue-sky fantasy of the sun shining on a sanitised Southeast Asian seaweed farm, ‘Balinese’ support-cast and composited locations, Clooney and Roberts try to deliver old-style star-wattage as the endlessly bickering divorced parents of law school graduate Kaitlyn Dever. Universal will be looking to see how that relates to a new gently-ageing generation of film-goers, even though Ticket To Paradise seems unlikely to attract any of their kids.

Directed and co-written by Ol Parker (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), the film’s premise is thin, necessitating multiple split-screens to jazz it along. Married 25 years ago, divorced five years later, the equally affluent David (Clooney) and Georgia (Roberts) are united only in their love for their wan daughter Lily (Dever), as witnessed during her graduation ceremony from law school. Lily goes on holiday to Bali with her best friend Wren (an under-used Billie Lourd in an under-written role), meets seaweed-farming hunk Gede (French-Indonesian actor Maxime Bouttier), and quickly decides to marry him, avoiding a future career in law that she never wanted. Desperate for their daughter not to repeat their own mistake, David and Georgia race to the Indonesian island and form a pact to stop the marriage in its tracks.

Breaking up your only daughter’s wedding is a pretty mean thing to do, as David and Georgia eventually find out, especially when they’re as defencelessly bland as Lily and Gede - it’s like kicking puppies. And, in the meantime, sparks seem to be flying between the divorced couple themselves, despite the presence of Georgia’s younger, fawning pilot boyfriend Paul (Lucas Bravo).

There’s a whole sub-industry based on wedding films, and Working Title is a pro at them. Whether these inevitably affluent, white fantasy dramas of the nineties and noughties (Four Weddings, Notting Hill, etc) still carry weight with audiences in a post-Covid-19, post-straight, post-splash-the-cash world remains to be seen, although the preponderance of bridal magazines on the racks seems to be a positive indication. Ticket To Paradise was shot mostly on the Whitsundays and while it brought in advisors to help with the accurate depiction of Balinese wedding ceremonies, that authenticity doesn’t belong to the paradise-heavy sets, which are so clean it looks like everyone’s in a theme park. Never has seaweed shone so bright, but then again, it’s being sold directly to Whole Foods.

Ticket To Paradise clearly means well, but its depiction of Indonesian islanders as superstitious naifs does come across as helplessly retrograde, stuck in a time warp. That old-fashioned feeling seems targeted to move Clooney and Roberts out of action films and into a new, more forgiving demographic as older stars in the firmament age out. With a decades-long rapport on screen and off, they’re natural and sparky together, and Roberts joins Clooney in her decision not to present the cosmetically refreshed face of her peers. For that alone, Ticket To Paradise is a trip worth taking.