Lonely Planet is the third MILF romcom (MILFcom?) to come out this year, after The Idea of You and A Family Affair. I don't think it's as sexy as the first one or as funny as the latter one, but of the three it's the cutest one. It's Laura Dern + Liam Hemsworth, playing to their sunny girlboss and sensitive himbo personas.
The movie takes place at a swanky writer's retreat in Morocco. Dern is a famous writer struggling with her latest novel, Hemsworth is a finance bro with zero literacy who's +1 to another up-and-coming writer. They slowly bond together over their shared ennui. It's the more pedestrian version of Lost in Translation, although you never believe the location here. Tokyo is confusing, overwhelming and claustrophobic? Yup. But the locals at Morocco don't take kindly to women who're 1) unaccompanied or 2) "expose" themselves. The idea that a feminist writer looking for peace and quiet would go to a Muslim den in order to finish her book unnocited and unmolested is like going to Mordor for the shrimp cocktails.
But anyway, it's a slow burn. We watch Dern and the lesser Hemsworth grow close for the majority of the movie before anything actually happens. There's not much going on between them beyond that particular chemistry of watching attractive people be attracted to each other. I guess the movie's more dramatic than outright comedic, but again, the plot is too thin to matter. When they must fight to close Act Two they barely have anything to work with. She snaps at him because she lost the corny novel she was writing, her MacBook apparently not once in two years having saved anything to the cloud, not even by accident.
letterboxd.com
