There’s an old Irish blessing that goes something like this: May you go on a free trip to Morocco and fall in love with a Hemsworth. Until it comes true for us all, we’ll have to live vicariously through Laura Dern in the new film Lonely Planet (Netflix, October 11). Dern plays novelist Katherine, who is invited to a retreat at a gorgeous estate in the Atlas Mountains. She hopes to shake off her writer’s block there—but instead (or also), she meets a young private equity hunk named Owen (Liam Hemsworth).
The private equity thing does reduce his hunkiness significantly; in the film, he’s in the middle of purchasing a coal mining company, and writer-director Susannah Grant allows for just a little skepticism about his noxious industry. Otherwise, we are meant to be as swept off our feet as Katherine, whose heart gradually opens to romantic possibility after a difficult breakup, and whose mind is cleared to make way for a new book.
We’ve seen this sort of thing before—Lonely Planet, instead of aping the title of a travel book series, could have been called Under the Marrakech Sun. Or how about Eat, Write, Love Liam Hemsworth? Though there isn’t a ton of eating in this film, save for a sandwich that gives Owen narratively convenient food poisoning.
Owen is on the trip as the guest of his girlfriend, budding young novelist Lily (Diana Silvers), whose enthusiasm for the experience is strangely treated as rudeness to Owen. Accidentally or not, Lonely Planet makes the compelling case for not bringing a significant other on certain sorts of work trips. (Especially when there are cute Libyan memoirists to be flirting with.) But there Owen is, and the script must find ways to separate him from Lily so that he can banter with Katherine.
They wind up the only two people on an excursion, the setup being that Katherine wants to get some writing done in the backseat of an SUV as it bumps down mountain roads—I’m surprised Owen is the only one who vomits in the movie. In sequences like these, Grant leans into the hoary exoticism that has long plagued stories like this; surrounded by humble Moroccan village folk, two wealthy white people form a palpable connection.
Lonely Planet is full of such cliché, from Owen’s constant work interruptions—why can’t we just unplug, man—to the myriad generic literary references meant to smarten things up. This is not as sophisticated a movie as it would like to be. And yet it has its pleasures. The film’s romanticized setting is, indeed, awfully alluring, as is its dreamy idea that some unexpected love affair may be waiting just a free business-class plane ride away.
It’s also remarkable, if also depressing, that this is Dern’s first lead film role in six years. That is far too big a gap, and we should be grateful that the drought has ended. Dern brings the earthiness and wistful insight that the script tries for but can’t quite conjure. She sharply plays a person gradually letting herself go, giving into the moment despite a well-earned guardedness. I found myself craving some Enlightened-style (or, maybe more aptly, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel-style) voice over, anything that might give us more of Dern in a movie seriously in need of her.
Hemsworth is perfectly tall and handsome in his role, but he doesn’t do quite enough to shape a former quarterback turned corporate raider into someone likable. It’s never clear why we should side with Owen in his arguments with Lily—at least until Grant drops in a plot device that perhaps unfairly tilts the scales. Still, we understand Katherine’s dawning infatuation: here is someone completely different from those in her literati circles, a friendly basic who is surprisingly open to deep conversation. Maybe he’s not so basic after all!
Lonely Planet goes pretty much exactly where one it expects it to, but this is a formula that is popular for a reason. Fantasies like this can satisfy even in creaky packaging. All it takes, really, is some nice scenery and a pair of actors who can sell their chemistry. Lonely Planet checks those boxes, even if it makes one yearn for a more elegant vehicle for Dern—one in which her romantic adventure might prove genuinely inspiring.