Couples Retreat (2009)

Couples Retreat arrives from 2009, a year when a studio comedy could still assemble four married couples, deposit them at the St. Regis in Bora Bora, and call the result a motion picture. Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau wrote it, Peter Billingsley directed it, and the finished product spends its runtime alternating between marital grievance and lingering shots of luxury amenities. The therapy is mandatory. So is the Guitar Hero. The film was a commercial success and a critical ruin, which is its own kind of honesty.

The cast is more varied than the genre strictly required. Faizon Love and Kali Hawk appear as the mismatched couple, Tasha Smith plays an ex-wife, Temuera Morrison serves as the resort's Maori assistant, and Ken Jeong and Amy Hill turn up as therapists. None of this is framed as a statement. Race never enters the conversation, and the film metes out the same mild contempt to its Black characters that it reserves for everyone else, which is at least consistent. The notorious international poster, the one that erased Love and Hawk entirely, belongs to the marketing department and not to the text. The film itself simply casts broadly and moves on, a habit we can credit without pretending it was advocacy.

Elsewhere the ledger is empty. No queer characters, no feminist reading of the wives' grievances, no environmental sermon about the fragile lagoon, no critique of the resort economy that the film is, in practice, advertising. Bud Light and Captain Morgan paid for placement. The word neurotic gets used to describe a couple, which is as close as the screenplay comes to psychology. The therapy sessions dispense advice about communication, not lectures about society. The rest is a broad comedy about unhappy marriages in a beautiful place, which is precisely what it was built to be.