If all you did with your time was watch movies, you’d think that aliens were always on the brink of invading our planet, masked killers terrorized small coastal or Midwestern towns every Halloween, and women over 35 were constantly going on trips to foreign lands to find themselves and hook up with a hot guy or two.
Lonely Planet, Netflix’s latest romance, written and directed by Susannah Grant (Unbelievable), fits into this third category, starring Laura Dern as an accomplished novelist who stumbles into a love affair while on a writer's retreat. It may be enough for longtime fans of Dern to see her finally get her Eat Pray Love (or, more accurately, her The Idea of You), but Lonely Planet, out Oct. 11, rarely strays past the established boundaries and clichés of the foreign-set romantic drama.
Katherine Loewe (Dern) arrives in Morocco only to realize that her luggage hasn’t. Stress from writer’s block and her impending separation from her husband (and lack of clean underwear) sequester her inside her room, declining invitations to meet up with the international group of celebrated authors also attending the retreat. As such, it takes Katherine a few days to run into Owen (Liam Hemsworth), the handsome boyfriend of Lily Kemp (Diana Silvers), a sort of Emily Henry type.
Owen is not a writer, as his girlfriend flippantly explains over dinner, and feels especially out of place among the group of prickly intellectuals. But he recognizes Katherine: “I see your face in bed a lot,” he blurts out, quickly clarifying that Lily reads her books, which all have her face on the back cover. Both out of their depth for different reasons, Katherine and Owen find a closeness in avoiding everyone else, which inevitably turns into more.
Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth
NetflixBecause the characterizations of all of these people are so spare, you have to fill in a lot of the blanks yourself. It’s unclear what, specifically, Katherine likes to write about in the books that have made her such a global phenomenon. Owen, an investor, makes a lot of phone calls about coal and speaks in football metaphors. Lily is mainly just a passively bad girlfriend, her only sin being that she’s probably not dating the love of her life. It happens!
The side characters are an eclectic mix of types—the rude yet wise older matron, the sexy and sex-addicted philosopher king, the Scandinavian constantly correcting everyone’s pronunciation of his name. They’ve all got about five bits of dialogue apiece, to remind you that there are other people in this world during the moments when the main couple aren’t mooning after each other.
Even their romance is predictable, once the movie establishes who its two main characters are, and the depths of their self-imposed outsider natures. “F--- him or kill him,” another author offers as unsolicited advice for Katherine’s manuscript. Which, if this were a more salacious story, would perhaps indicate something exciting or dramatic, but we all know which one she’ll pick.
The movie does prod a little at Katherine and Owen’s dynamic—that of an older woman and a man a little more than half her age—but even these scenes are polite about it all, as if Lonely Planet is outwardly determined not to be the type of movie that pokes campy fun at the cougar plot, or do anything that could stray into the realm of cancellation (Dern is 57, Hemsworth is 34; their characters are consenting adults, it’s fine).
Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth
Anne Marie Fox/NetflixWriter-director Grant’s most feted achievement is her screenplay for Erin Brockovich, but Lonely Planet has little of that movie’s electricity and sense of surprise. There are a couple of conversations and arguments between Katherine and Owen that address the reality of their situation, but even these are truncated and unresolved, as if there isn’t any time for either of these people to dig a little deeper.
They’re both charming, with Hemsworth in particular relishing a role that feels more mature after his teen-heartthrob days, but the material is too bare to allow the story to move beyond its general expectations. It’s nice that everyone got a beautiful Moroccan vacation out of this, at least.
