“Summer Camp”: Diane Keaton and Friends’ S’more Servings

Keaton plays Nora, a workaholic scientist drawn on a girls’ trip to her reunion at a 50-year-old camp with her childhood bunkmates, the loud-mouthed and Mary (Alfre Woodard), an unhappy nurse. . In the past, Nora, Ginny and Mary (played in their youth by Taylor Madeline Hand, Kensington Tallman and Audrianna Lico) were the losers exiled to the Sassafras cabin. Now Ginny is a celebrity self-help guru with serious influence and the former Popular Girls are led by a beautifully groomed Pilates junkie named Jane (Beverly D’Angelo, funny and playful) who happens to be Ginny’s biggest fan .

Whether you believe summer camp reunions are real in the first place, Landon makes it clear she’s trafficking in fantasy as soon as wealthy Ginny rearranges their cobweb bunk into a luxury cabin with a wine fridge , personalized riding boots and vibrators for souvenirs. The story is as predictable as a campfire song. Each of the friends has a fundamental problem to resolve, but the film is really about the winding path to enlightenment, which takes frequent detours for food fights, pillow fights and pottery classes with lots of erotic noises clumsy.

Meanwhile, the seniors battle with young, wacky camp counselors (Betsy Sodaro and Josh Peck, both terrific) who struggle to assert their authority. The soundtrack delivers as many needle drops to the nose as possible. (Yes, we’re hearing Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69.”)

The throwback atmosphere invites the actors to straddle two ages simultaneously. The women pretend to be old, overworked and exhausted, but once they return to a dining hall – even one where a bartender serves martinis – they revert to being teenagers giggling over who will sneak in for a midnight kiss.

Keaton’s character is still so close to Keaton. It’s a narrative rule that its characters suddenly realize that – gasp – they look incredible in a wide belt. The rest of the cast is free to do what they want with their roles, which results in a colorful mess akin to the doodles on a shared stand, from which many of the jokes also come, including a gag stamp, so surprising that it be relegated to the end credits.

Bates enjoys playing a caricature role that constantly attracts the attention of his TikTok followers, while comic Eugene Levy, removing his trademark glasses to play the girls’ crush, Stevie D, struts with the confidence of an idol. “That name sounded a lot bolder when we were 14,” jokes Nora.

Yet Woodard often seems to be in his own movie. She gives her character as a stifled woman such gravitas that you could turn her entire performance into a serious drama. In her first scene, Mary is pestered on the phone by her husband (Tom Wright), a mostly off-screen presence, who wants help finding a snack while she performs chest compressions on a patient at the hospital. It’s a ridiculous moment delivered with unusual conviction.

Woodard’s scenes shouldn’t amount to slapstick, but we find ourselves caught up in rooting for Mary to leave the louse and fall in love with an impossibly perfect doctor (Dennis Haysbert) who has traveled to the meeting from his charity clinic at Myanmar. What happens next is the fulfillment of a frothy, forgettable wish — but hey, that’s why everyone is watching in the first place.

PG-13. In cinemas in the region. Contains sexual material, strong language and underage smoking. 96 minutes.