A novelist meets a financier two decades her junior at a writers’ retreat in Morocco, in this welcome addition to a flurry of age-gap romances released this summer.
Be it a quirk of timing or the invisible hand of trend cycles, Hollywood seems ready to reconsider the idea of the “older woman”. A wave of age-gap romances have brought the traditionally objectified mommy-age lover into the mainstream this year, including Anne Hathaway’s tryst with a boybander in The Idea of You; Carol Kane’s free-spirited grandmother involved with a decades-younger widower in Between the Temples; and Nicole Kidman’s transgressive dalliances in both A Family Affair (with Zac Efron’s movie star) and the forthcoming Babygirl (with Harris Dickinson’s intern). And that’s not to mention the weirder, psychosexual French version – a 50ish lawyer seducing her gangly teenage stepson – in Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer.
Now Lonely Planet, a Netflix film from Susannah Grant, writer of Erin Brockovich and most recently the co-creator of the underrated series Unbelievable, continues what Vulture’s Rachel Handler has termed “the year of New Milf Cinema” with a travel romance that exceeds Netflix’s middling expectations.
Catherine Lowe, a professionally successful though personally devastated novelist played by Laura Dern, is not, as far as we know, a mother. Parenthood doesn’t come up in Lonely Planet, which is predominantly, and sometimes fruitfully, concerned with people’s double-edged relationships to work and/or individual purpose. But Catherine is a woman of a certain age, beyond that which society typically deems sexually viable or even just valuable. And she’s reckoning with a mid-life crisis – divorce, rejection, creative stagnancy, what’s next? – via a writers’ retreat in Morocco and a norms-breaking attraction to a decades-younger man.
As expected, Catherine is internally ruffled though outwardly unimpressed by Owen (Liam Hemsworth), the hunky, charming and quietly disillusioned plus-one of another writer at the retreat. Owen is accordingly turned on by Catherine’s apparent lack of interest in him. She spends the bulk of their first interactions ignoring him in favour of her past-due novel, and the film features its fair share of Dern dressed enviably in fit trousers and linens, looking frustrated while pecking at screens (complimentary).
For reasons we can chalk up to chemistry and the magic of new places, Owen is drawn to Catherine’s solitary workaholism while repelled by his girlfriend Lily Kemp’s (Booksmart’s Diana Silvers) similar ambitions and writerly pretensions. Lily is a character designed to make female viewers jealous: model-thin, gorgeous, an overnight literary success for her “glorified beach read” debut novel despite having never published anything before. She admires Catherine and is thus believably awkward with her; Catherine, also believably, rebuffs Lily’s advances while finding new ways to connect with her boyfriend. For his part, Owen, a high-school quarterback turned New York finance bro who does not read books, feels out of place.
These characters are all in some way aspirational, though not particularly admirable. Owen and Catherine repeat the phrase “new and exotic” about Morocco a few too many times for comfort – lamenting how travel does not actually take you far from yourself, while bonding over an impromptu visit to a local village. Owen makes a passing effort to interact with Lily; Lily barely hides how boring she finds him, and is clearly taken with Rafih (Younès Boucif), who “wrote that beautiful memoir about his time as a child soldier in Libya!” (lol). All three of them are at times oblivious and self-absorbed and they say laughably on-the-nose things, particularly as Owen develops a moral conscience about private equity screwing over a family-owned coalmine in West Virginia.
Yet Lonely Planet proves to be smarter and more attentive than its beach-read feint. The film features plenty of tourism-ad footage of Morocco, from Marrakech to Chaouen, that elevates it above the overlit Netflix canon. But it also undercuts its own exoticism with a short and effective montage of service workers at the retreat cleaning up beer bottles, trash and a discarded bra after the group’s nightly revelry. All the character flaws, paradoxically, give heft to a likable central romance between two easily dislikable people, who are filmed with a winsome naturalness, and blurred edges like their tipsy circling of each other. Both Dern and Hemsworth bring their requisite qualities (luminous, layered neuroticism, sad eyes and abs) to the pairing, which feels spiky, surprising and tender, up to and including a very female gaze-y sex scene on the dresser.
Until the rushed conclusion, which dives headlong into improbable romance, Lonely Planet thankfully avoids soapy dramatics, preferring realistic breakdowns in communication, though I wish the envy between Catherine and Lily were a little better explored. Still, it’s better, more grounded and self-aware than expected, enough to overcome the cliches and occasionally clunky dialogue. It’s a mostly enjoyable addition to the welcome sub-genre about 40-plus, desiring women as considered, desirable subjects.
Lonely Planet is on Netflix from 11 October To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
There’s an old Irish blessing that goes something like this: May you go on a free trip to Morocco and fall in love with a Hemsworth. Until it comes true for us all, we’ll have to live vicariously through Laura Dern in the new film Lonely Planet (Netflix, October 11). Dern plays novelist Katherine, who is invited to a retreat at a gorgeous estate in the Atlas Mountains. She hopes to shake off her writer’s block there—but instead (or also), she meets a young private equity hunk named Owen (Liam Hemsworth).
The private equity thing does reduce his hunkiness significantly; in the film, he’s in the middle of purchasing a coal mining company, and writer-director Susannah Grant allows for just a little skepticism about his noxious industry. Otherwise, we are meant to be as swept off our feet as Katherine, whose heart gradually opens to romantic possibility after a difficult breakup, and whose mind is cleared to make way for a new book.
We’ve seen this sort of thing before—Lonely Planet, instead of aping the title of a travel book series, could have been called Under the Marrakech Sun. Or how about Eat, Write, Love Liam Hemsworth? Though there isn’t a ton of eating in this film, save for a sandwich that gives Owen narratively convenient food poisoning.
Owen is on the trip as the guest of his girlfriend, budding young novelist Lily (Diana Silvers), whose enthusiasm for the experience is strangely treated as rudeness to Owen. Accidentally or not, Lonely Planet makes the compelling case for not bringing a significant other on certain sorts of work trips. (Especially when there are cute Libyan memoirists to be flirting with.) But there Owen is, and the script must find ways to separate him from Lily so that he can banter with Katherine.
They wind up the only two people on an excursion, the setup being that Katherine wants to get some writing done in the backseat of an SUV as it bumps down mountain roads—I’m surprised Owen is the only one who vomits in the movie. In sequences like these, Grant leans into the hoary exoticism that has long plagued stories like this; surrounded by humble Moroccan village folk, two wealthy white people form a palpable connection.
Lonely Planet is full of such cliché, from Owen’s constant work interruptions—why can’t we just unplug, man—to the myriad generic literary references meant to smarten things up. This is not as sophisticated a movie as it would like to be. And yet it has its pleasures. The film’s romanticized setting is, indeed, awfully alluring, as is its dreamy idea that some unexpected love affair may be waiting just a free business-class plane ride away.
It’s also remarkable, if also depressing, that this is Dern’s first lead film role in six years. That is far too big a gap, and we should be grateful that the drought has ended. Dern brings the earthiness and wistful insight that the script tries for but can’t quite conjure. She sharply plays a person gradually letting herself go, giving into the moment despite a well-earned guardedness. I found myself craving some Enlightened-style (or, maybe more aptly, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel-style) voice over, anything that might give us more of Dern in a movie seriously in need of her.
Hemsworth is perfectly tall and handsome in his role, but he doesn’t do quite enough to shape a former quarterback turned corporate raider into someone likable. It’s never clear why we should side with Owen in his arguments with Lily—at least until Grant drops in a plot device that perhaps unfairly tilts the scales. Still, we understand Katherine’s dawning infatuation: here is someone completely different from those in her literati circles, a friendly basic who is surprisingly open to deep conversation. Maybe he’s not so basic after all!
Lonely Planet goes pretty much exactly where one it expects it to, but this is a formula that is popular for a reason. Fantasies like this can satisfy even in creaky packaging. All it takes, really, is some nice scenery and a pair of actors who can sell their chemistry. Lonely Planet checks those boxes, even if it makes one yearn for a more elegant vehicle for Dern—one in which her romantic adventure might prove genuinely inspiring.
