We don't ask for much, us rom-com devotees. Especially in this age where one is starved of romance on the big screen. We miss the meet-cutes, the impossibly charming banter, the grand against-all-odds love story.
For us, at their best, these touching stories of love and laughter can often house heartfelt humanity and gentle life lessons within their glossy packaging. Particularly for those of us who are forever seeking the relatable within the aspirational. Forever in search of how reel can add meaning to real. Enter Julia Roberts and George Clooney-starrer Ticket To Paradise which looks to fill the rom-com-shaped hole in our lives and mount the movie-stars-falling-in-love story on the big screen once again.
David (George Clooney) and Georgia (Julia Roberts) were college sweethearts. Hopelessly in love, they got married at a young age and had a daughter. 5 years on, real life caught up to their fairy tale, contempt trounced connection and the two had a messy divorce. 20 years later, their fresh-out-of-law-school daughter Lily (Kaityln Dever), dares to make the same mistake. What should’ve been a routine holiday in Bali before embarking on her new life as a lawyer, leads to Lily falling in love with Bali local Gede (a suitably charming Maxime Bouttier). A mere month later, Lily tells her parents she’s getting married. So, bickering exes David and Georgia call a temporary truce and set out to the island paradise to dedicate the trip to breaking up Lily and Gede and stopping their daughter from making the same mistake they did. And, of course, as they plot and plan to make their daughter see reason, old feelings resurface between the two.
These are promising, interesting ideas. Ex-spouses living in contempt and regret. The idea of traveling to an exotic location (this movie is basically Bali tourism porn) and being removed from your world to gain a new perspective on your life. The messy intersection between your own romantic failures and parenthood. Or even whether crazy, instantaneous, overnight love can truly exist (But more on this later).
But Ticket To Paradise isn’t interested in exploring these more mature, meaningful ideas. Instead, director Ol Parker (Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again) along with co-writer Daniel Pipski want to mount a frothy, feel-good, surface-level rom-com, at which they’re largely successful. Ticket To Paradise is hardly the kind of rom-com we’ll remember a year from now. But it nonetheless delivers on its promise - transporting us to an improbably-charming-good-looking-people world, to make us temporarily forget ours. And there is still, I think, power in that. In taking us back to a less complicated time.
On the rom-com spectrum of light laughs (Just Go With It, The Proposal, Long Shot) to more meaningful explorations of matters of the heart (500 Days Of Summer, About Time, The Half Of It), Ticket To Paradise certainly belongs to the former. A somewhat self-aware movie that seeks to merely tick the boxes of the by-the-book comfort watch. Especially in the humour-heavy first leg of the proceedings, Ticket To Paradise sails off the back of the sparkling, lovably comfortable chemistry between George Clooney and Julia Roberts. As two bickering, arguing-over-the-armrest ex-spouses forever at each other's throats, the stars share a delightfully childish, catty dynamic. (Georgia even as her ex-husband’s number saved on her phone as “Him”).