‘The Fabulous Four’ Is the Latest Humiliation of Seniors Seeking Employment

At a time when mature women are making giant strides toward honor, respect and dignity in every walk of life, progress to gain equal footing is evident everywhere except the movies. Even for accomplished award winners, if you’re a woman over 60 you’re toast. This has led to an alarming trend for aging stars still ready, willing and able to take their chances, pool their talents and band together on the same marquee to prove there’s safety in numbers. The results have so far been a sorry group of star-studded artistic and commercial flops that have failed to raise box-office expectations—ambitious projects such as Book Club (Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, Mary Steenburgen) and 80 for Brady (Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Sally Field, Rita Moreno).  Their eulogies were more interesting than the films themselves.

The latest example of the humiliations lovely seniors desperately seeking employment are forced to endure in order to call themselves working actors is a dismal comedy without a shred of wit, imagination or originality called The Fabulous Four. A piddling plot so thin you could write it on a matchbook cover centers on four aging gal pals—friends and roommates through college who vowed to stay loyal and supportive through life. Lou (Sudan Sarandon) is now a renowned heart surgeon, Kitty (Sheryl Lee Ralph) is a successful organic farmer who has made a fortune turning her knowledge of plant life into a legal cannabis business, and Alice (Megan Mullally) is a rock star with a passion for booze, drugs, sex with younger men, and Kitty’s endless supply of pot. The fourth member of the quartet is the silly, wealthy, fun-seeking, champagne-guzzling, recently widowed Marilyn (Bette Midler). When Marilyn announces without warning that she’s going to be married again at her mansion in Key West, Kitty and Alice quickly plan to be bridesmaids, and talk the reluctant Lou into joining them. Lou hasn’t spoken to Marilyn for 40 years since she seduced Lou’s boyfriend and married him. Lou would never attend a wedding or anything else if it involved Marilyn, but Kitty and Alice convince her to tag along under false pretenses by promising her a cat with six toes from a museum in the former home of Ernest Hemingway.

A lot of rage ensues when Lou discovers she’s been betrayed, and they all meander, scene by scene, through what’s left of the contrived screenplay. In a week tantamount to a reunion in hell, Lou falls in love with a bar owner (an aging Bruce Greenwood) who turns out to be the guy Marilyn is going to marry, Marilyn’s Kitty becomes infatuated with a gay male stripper who turns out to be her grandson, and a lot of time is wasted on moronic dialogue (“Why are you sweating like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs?”) and confusing sex jokes. Much confusion results from one scene in which Marilyn plants a purple sex toy on a string called a Kegel ball in Lou’s bed. “What are you supposed to do with that?” asks Kitty. “You shove it up your vagina,” Lou answers dryly. So much for the screenplay. The action ends in a vicious fistfight between Bette Midler and Susan Sarandon, before it all leads up in a preposterous musical number with the whole cast singing and awkwardly dancing to the 1972 pop tune “I Can See Clearly Now.” So much for the direction. 

The movie is an unsalvageable mess, but the most appalling problem is its premise that women will do anything to be admired, respected and taken seriously, but once they accomplish any kind of stronghold position as equals, they make fools of themselves with any demeaning misstep that will get them into the arms (and beds) of men. Sarandon’s the intelligent, straight-laced pragmatist in the quartet, but she turns out to be the biggest birdbrain of them all by giving up her lifelong dedication to medicine, staying in Key West, and spending the rest of her life snorkeling.  The way the fragments come together is implausible, but the way they all resolve in time for a happy ending is loopy and downright ludicrous. There is nothing fabulous about The Fabulous Four.