Maybe don't tell Jacki Weaver that though, as her response to Huston was literally "Well, she can go fuck herself". Of course, if you actually read both interviews both sides have a fair bit more nuance to them than that. Which is a good thing, because arguing over the quality of Poms is no way to spend your brief time on this globe.
To be fair, Poms actually isn't a "band of cheerleaders gets back together for one last hurrah" film. No, most of the cheerleaders at the old-folks home that's the center of this film are first-timers, so this is closer to one of those films where a bunch of lost middle aged types take up a group activity to give their lives meaning and also to do surprisingly well in some kind of public performance (ie The Full Monty). It's an important distinction, but we'll get back to that in a minute.
Anyway, Diane Keaton is a retired teacher who decides to move into a gated old folks community because she's got no kids or friends so what better place to die? Unfortunately her hard-partying neighbour (Jacki Weaver) wants to be friends. Worse, it's a community rule that you have to belong to a club, so - remembering a teenage dream that never quite came true - she starts a cheerleading club. Hijinks never quite manage to ensue.
The problem here is that the screenwriters have gone and mixed up two distinctly different (but easily confused) kinds of film. The first kind involves middle-aged people feeling like their lives are going nowhere who band together in some kind of group activity and through that find new meaning in their lives. Yay! These movies are bullshit, but they work as movies: the characters have an underlying problem (meaninglessness) and they find a solution (a community based around a hobby).
The second kind involves a bunch of old people getting together again to show they still have what it takes to do some group activity they used to do when they were young (usually, but not always, crime-related). Yay! These movies are also bullshit, but they also work as movies: the characters have an underlying problem (a need to show they're not dead yet) and they find a solution (giving an old activity one last go).
Poms mashes the two together to create the worst of both worlds. Here it's old people feeling like their lives are going nowhere - only once your characters are over 70 and living in a retirement community that's literally true, and there's no real way to solve that problem unless you're remaking Cocoon. That doesn't mean you can't tell an interesting story about them, but it does mean you can't tell this story, because then you're telling the story of a bunch of old people taking up a hobby to pass the time before they die, and that's just sad.
Having old people do something they were once good at makes sense in a movie because (in theory) they still have the skills they once had; these characters have no skills, and so this is a movie about old people keeping busy. It doesn't solve their underlying problem, so it doesn't work as a movie; at best, having them be cheerleaders is a kind of jokey "say whaaaaat?" high concept, not something that says anything about who the characters are or why we should care about them.
There are plenty of other reasons why this is a bad night out; it's not very funny, the supporting performances are not great, it's filmed like an sub-standard episode of Desperate Housewives, and so on. But it's the script that makes this a waste of time; ironically, the concept Anjelica Huston sneered at would have made this a much better film.
- Anthony Morris
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