Movie Review: 'Poms' Isn't the Worst of Diane Keaton, Still Bad Though

That Poms is bad is something I could have written without having seen the movie. Star Diane Keaton hasn’t made a movie actually worth sitting through in more than 30 years—it was unlikely that dressing as a cheerleader was going to reverse that trend. Yet another exercise in the sub-genre of old people doing young people things, Poms is filled with gags about how old people have almost constant pain and are near death. Hilarious, right?

Poms stars Diane Keaton as Martha. Martha is a retired teacher with no kids or extended family and she’s dying from an elderly woman version of what I have termed "Pretty Cancer." Pretty cancer is usually reserved for tacky teen romances that use the specter of death to create a false sense of depth. Poms proves that filmmakers can distastefully employ the specter of death from cancer at any age and make it just as tacky.

Martha has sold all of her belongings and is moving to a furnished home in a retirement community in Georgia called Sun Springs. Here, she hopes to die quietly and without being bothered. So she’s fun. Martha’s plan to go gently into that good night is upended by her neighbor, Sheryl (Jacki Weaver), one of those only in the movies party starters who doesn’t acknowledge social cues and doesn’t understand body language, personal space, or general courtesy.

Sheryl is a vivacious personality who, get ready to be shocked, still enjoys having sex even though she’s elderly. I know—isn’t it hilarious? It’s as if people over the age of 60 are still human beings with human desires. In the world of Poms, however, Sheryl is an outcast and a rebel and her human qualities are treated as punchlines, what few human qualities she’s given. One of the strange things about Poms is that as much time as we spend with these characters, we never get a sense of a genuine person beyond the punchlines and screenplay necessitated motivations.

Oh right, the plot. Eventually, Sheryl bullies her way into being friends with Martha and, over a bottle of wine, Martha admits that her biggest regret is missing the chance to have been a cheerleader in High School. Martha had actually made the cheerleading time in High School her senior year but had to give up the team when her mother became ill and she was tapped to stay home and care for her during her final days.

With cheerleading still on her bucket list, Martha tells Sheryl she wants to start a cheerleading club at Sun Springs. This flies in the face of Vicki (Celia Weston), the Queen Bee of Sun Springs, who dictates what activities are allowed to be carried on in the community. According to Celia’s arbitrary rules, clubs in the community must have at least eight members or they can’t make use of the community room as rehearsal and meeting space.

This leads to a stock series of scenes in which the filmmakers mock a series of elderly women who try out for the club. Why tryouts are held is not addressed. The club has to have eight members regardless of talent and only six people turn up anyway so the audition scenes are exposed rather quickly as an excuse to point and laugh at older women as they prance about, self-consciously exhibiting their cheerleader-adjacent talents.

I should say, five women turned up for auditions, Alice (Rhea Perlman) signed up but didn’t show for the actual audition. Needing Alice to get to eight members, Martha and Sheryl confront Alice and find out that she pulled out because her controlling husband would not allow her to be a cheerleader. Our heroes implore her to ask again and in minutes the answer she receives is over her husband’s dead body and then, he’s actually dead. The joke, in case it doesn’t occur to you, is that Alice killed him. This joke goes nowhere beyond the portion that’s in the film’s trailer.

Eventually the team adds Sheryl’s grandson, Ben (Charlie Tahan) as the guy who plays their music from his phone, and Chloe (Alisha Boe), a young cheer Captain whom they blackmailed into becoming their cheer coach. Boe is a lovely actress and the only person in the movie who isn’t repeatedly humiliated. Boe is best known for her work on the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why and if she can avoid movies like Poms in the future, she’s got a fine career ahead of her.

Poms was directed by Zara Hayes, a documentary veteran who makes her feature film debut with Poms. Hayes is not a bad director but she relies far too heavily on the worst possible tropes of this kind of comedy. Hayes directs Poms with apparent contentment with making the old ladies doing young people stuff, the only gag in the movie. There is no invention, and aside from a couple line deliveries that earn a chuckle, there is nothing that stands out about Poms.

I would praise the carpentry of the film, it looks okay, but the structure of the story is so awful I thought more than once that reels of the movie were missing and they were the parts that made the story make sense and contained the actual characters. One egregious example has the villainous Vicki banning the cheer team from their rehearsal space followed by a smash cut to the team working out in the same rehearsal space.

A scene gets added several minutes later in which one of the team members hangs a sign on the door claiming the cheerleaders are now a quilting club but by then the awful editing has removed the necessity for such sloppy attempts at explanation. This happens more than once in the movie like the scenes where Martha is randomly assigned to teach Ben how to drive, a plot that goes nowhere, is dropped almost immediately after introduction, only to be inexplicably brought back at the end as if the plot had been important.

Did Diane Keaton make a deal with the devil 30 years ago? After the middling, not terrible Baby Boom, did she ask Satan to give her eternal life in exchange for her dignity? That’s the only thing I can think of that explains the remarkably awful choices she makes when picking movies to be part of. Poms is, much to my surprise, her least egregious work of the past three decades but that isn’t a high bar to get over.

Movies like Because I Said So, The Family Stone, and Mad Money are toxic movies, insufferable, unfunny disasters that made me despise the sight of the woman I once adored as Annie Hall. The kindest thing I can say about Poms is that I didn’t find it toxic. Poms is bad, poorly made, tacky, but I didn’t actively loathe every moment it was on screen. That’s something. Character actor Bruce McGill even managed to do what no one in a Diane Keaton movie has done in years—he made me laugh.

Now, that laugh while watching Poms was entirely predicated on McGill’s energy and spot on timing and nothing to do with the plot, characters, or story, but it was a laugh, a real one, out loud. McGill appears as surprised and tickled by his joke as I apparently was and his delight was infectious. McGill is not at all central to Poms and the movie could easily exist without him, but I am glad he was there. I needed that one laugh.