Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lonely Planet’ on Netflix, a Laura Dern-Liam Hemsworth May-December romance (2024)

Lonely Planet (now on Netflix) confirms the older woman/younger dude May-December romance is a bona-fide trend in 2024. First was Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine doin’ it in The Idea of You, then Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron jumpin’ each other’s bones in A Family Affair, and now we have Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth gettin’ it on in this kissyface drama. (You know how this stuff goes – one instance is an anomaly, two is a coincidence, three is a trend, and if we get one more before year’s end, it’ll be a danged epidemic.) Planet is the product of writer-director Susannah Grant, Oscar-nominated scripter of Erin Brockovich, whose other writing credits include In Her Shoes, 28 Days, and The Soloist; this is her second directorial effort after 2006’s Catch and Release. I list all of these mid-tier movies hoping you’ll remember one or two of them, and Lonely Planet seems destined to exist among them in the realm of the almost-forgotten. But hey, I bet it cracks the Netflix Top 10 for a week or two, since that’s the ideal destination for perfectly acceptable movies like this.

LONELY PLANET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Question: Do published authors really get to go to all-expenses-paid Moroccan resorts to hang out and party and maybe almost get some work done, under the guise of it being a “writer’s retreat”? Not sure. I’m trying not to get hung up on it. But we gotta move on as best as we can. We meet Katherine Loewe (Dern) fresh off the plane from NYC, weary, her luggage lost and in need of some peace and quiet. She’s a veteran of these things, and she knows they’re more distracting than productive, and she intends to be as undistracted as possible because her editor’s on her heinie to remove words from her brain and input them into a word processor. She seems to be good at that. She’s a career writer with several successful books in her bibliography (how many and to what extent, I’d like to know, but it’s left vague) and is a veteran of these retreats. This time, socializing isn’t her priority. She wants a quiet room and if people aren’t happy with her skipping the workshops and dinners, well, they’ll have to deal. We get the impression that things at home have eaten into her writing time, because her ex keeps texting her real estate listings. It appears to be time for her to find a new place to live. By herself.

Next to arrive are Lily Kemp (Diana Silvers) and her S.O. Owen Brophy (Hemsworth). Her first novel went kaboom overnight, and now she has to get over her imposter syndrome – “my book is a beach read,” she says as she eyeballs a Nobel winner over yonder. It doesn’t take long. Before you can say Dan Brown sucks cantaloupes through a coffee stirrer she’s whooping it up and boozing it with all the acclaimed authors, and she’s belittling Owen “the bro” Brophy in front of everyone because “all he reads is Sports Illustrated.” It stings. He seems like a nice guy, even though he works “in finance” for a company that acquires real estate then flips it for profit, a job that requires him to be on his phone all the time when he should be, I dunno, standing next to Lily as she makes him feel inferior in front of all the people she’s trying to impress?

Rest assured, Lonely Planet is a movie that has little interest in meet-cutes, and that’s why Owen and Katherine have a meet-totally-normal. A couple of them, to be exact. She wants to GTFO with her laptop, so she hops in a truck that’ll take her to a nearby city (what city? Why do we need to know such things? Specificity is for weebs, bro) and finds herself in the backseat next to Owen. They end up eating together and shopping together and sidelined by car trouble together and hanging out with the driver’s family for a White Foreigners Among Ethnic People submersion-in-the-culture scene together. They end up talking about how travel makes a person feel tiny and humble, and if I recall correctly, she quotes Truffaut (or maybe it was Flaubert? It was definitely a French guy), and he quotes, like, Aaron Rodgers. (That’s a lie. The Rodgers bit. Never happened. But Owen is a former football player.) There’s a bit where Owen says, “I see your face in bed a lot,” and it’s because Lily reads all of Katherine’s books before sleepytime. Will he see her real face in bed before this movie’s over? Well, these are the two most attractive people in the movie, in their Northern African white linen shirts and, eventually, bathing suits by the pool. It’d be a damn shame if those clothes didn’t come off at some point.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Take one of the aforementioned May-Decembers and cross it with the less crappy parts of Eat Pray Love and you’re in the vicinity of Lonely Planet.

Performance Worth Watching: As a card-carrying member of the I’d Watch Laura Dern Read the Phone Book club, I’ll take this opportunity to say that Dern brings warmth, depth and complexity to a film that kinda doesn’t deserve it.

Memorable Dialogue: “It’s always bothered me that you don’t read fiction,” Lily says to Owen as we say to the screen, DUMP HER ASS.

Sex and Skin: Ooh. Yeah. There’s some of it. It’s a little clunky and no bits or butts are shown but it’s at least medium-hot.

Our Take: I’m not sure why this movie is titled Lonely Planet – maybe in homage to the travel magazine, but it doesn’t quite fit since our two protags are lonely but are they “planets”? I dunno. At least it’s not the usual generic title that plagues so many Netflix movies; there may already be one called Older Woman Frenches Younger Guy in an Exotic Locale somewhere in the content menus. Anyway, I liked the first hour of this rom-without-the-com, even the corny bits that make you cringe like you just swallowed a thumbtack. I mean, there’s a scene where Katherine tries to guess Owen’s high-school nickname, and not only is it “The Big O,” but she guesses it correctly. Good effing grief. This is the kind of shit that makes reasonable people unreasonably angry if it isn’t being sold to us by a pro like Dern and an amiable chap like Hemsworth, and I therefore did not put my shoe through the screen, and somehow still rooted for them to eventually smoosh genitals.

What works quite well, however, is how Grant eases into the hormonal chemistry of her two leads. She avoids just-add-gorgeous-scenery phony instacharm and allows Katherine and Owen to be realistic humans who work through the awkwardness of circumstance and gettin’-to-know-ya small talk to eventually learn real, substantial things about each other. Neither is particularly happy in this moment in time, until they establish a connection. It’s warm, inviting and intimate. And then we get to a third act that nearly nukes the hard work and goodwill of the previous hour with a series of dramatic contrivances that feel far too committed to mainstream-romance formulas. But that’s OK. I don’t think anyone is here for subtextual commentary on whatever this movie might comment on (the age gap? The healing power of lovely exotic scenery? How helmeted people can ride a motorcycle through the desert and still have absolutely perfect hair upon dismounting?). This slightly flimsy, but just-good-enough romance is all about modest investments and modest returns.

Our Call: Lonely Planet isn’t as engaging as The Idea of You and not as funny as A Family Affair. But it was nice to me and I feel compelled to be nice right back. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.