Summer Camp

Summer Camp is a story about three friends who grow up, grow apart and come back together. Or, that is probably how it was pitched and, for the first twenty minutes or so, it really seems to be holding true to that premise. Showing three friends that meet fifty years ago in summer camp-though, given the ages of the actresses playing them, it would have to have been more like sixty-five or seventy years ago-the film begins to fall apart in little ways. This is another of those films that doesn’t have any single element that is egregiously poor, but where a thousand cuts add up to disappointment. There will be spoilers, because this one cannot be properly discussed without them.

The problem with the film begins with it immediately betraying its central premise of friendship, wrapping the film up in an empowerment story that is really just an excuse for selfishness, while claiming growth occurs where it does not. Ginny, a self-help figure played by Kathy Bates, is the prime culprit in this. Early on, she laments that one of her friends, Mary, played by Alfre Woodard, did not become a doctor, but “just a nurse” in a statement that oozes with ignorance and haughty intolerance. In what world is a nurse not a profession to aspire to? And, of course, at film’s end, Mary has been convinced that yes, she’s spent thirty years or more as “just a nurse” and will now “really join the medical profession” because, apparently, that’s the exclusive domain of doctors. This would not be as big a problem if you ever got real motivations as to why being a nurse was a second choice for her. The only one having a problem is Ginny.

Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

If the idea of the film is to stand your ground and not let others bully you, this film is not about that but about how peer pressuring is actually a great thing and your entire life should change if one old friend talks down to you for a weekend about the choices you have made that they do not approve. The same thing that happened to Mary happens to Nora, the character played by Dianne Keaton, who is…something involving testing dangerous chemicals? Is she a lead scientist? A CEO? Is she both? Well, Ginny does not approve and that is all that matters. Yes, Nora needs to find some balance in her life, but Ginny is a selfish, destructive force.

Despite scene after scene of insults, nobody ever fully calls her out on this and, indeed, people constantly make excuses. Even at the moment when it appears she has realized she is not great people, the ones she has harmed come to her and tell her not to change, thanking her for how she has opened their eyes and saying “well, the ends justified the means” (paraphrasing) in a statement that epitomizes the trapped victimhood the film wants to pretend it is arguing against. Indeed, the only time you can sort of see a character grow is when (Name, nurse) decides she has had enough of her husband. Even then, it comes off weak, being in the middle of her contemplating an affair with someone she has had a crush on for over five decades.

Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

As a whole, the jokes in this one are flat, with an annoying “camp security” character being given much of the weirder comedy bits and none of it working well. The best moments are those early scenes, where the humor seems rooted in character rather than situation and the situations, as such, arise from character choices. During the course of the film, the script forgets itself, and the director does not have a deft enough hand to either rein in the cast when they go too broad, or motivate when they become bored, nor to correct course in the script itself.

Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

Even the presence of Eugene Levy and Dennis Haysbert, as love interests for the Keaton and Woodard characters, respectively, is not enough to save this film from the pile of also rans. When Haysbert’s big scene is a food fight, and Levy has his every scene interrupted by much less interesting performers, you have a problem. Did I mention that Beverly D’Angelo is in this, gets one good scene out of perhaps two she is in, and then vanishes? What is the point of her character? Is it to show that Ginny has more cruelty than kindness in her methods? A better movie would likely have taken that approach, but here you have her character having a meltdown viewed as a breakthrough, and thanking Ginny for this. Absurd, and not often funny. Like the rest of the film. Too bad that first act was not what the film remained.

Summer Camp is currently playing in select theaters.