This cloyingly feel-good road trip flick, centered on three cross-country-driving gal pals all well into their golden years, is like Thelma and Louise for the Lifetime network (sans the gratuitous suicide at the end). The problem here is certainly not with the casting: former Hollywood heavyweights Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, and Joan Allen play the three lead protagonists, all leading staunchly middle-American lives in sleepy Pocatello, Idaho.
Except that Arvilla’s (Lange) husband has just died suddenly and now she finds herself in a sticky situation with her husband’s daughter from a previous marriage (Francine, played by Christine Baranski) who wants to have her dad buried next to her mother. But by the time Arvilla learns this, she has already had her late hubby cremated. And this is the spark that sets off the movie’s geriatric road-tripping plot.
Francine poses a challenge to Arvilla: if she can get the ashes to California in time for the funeral service, she can keep her house (as the devious Francine is now the rightful owner). Although this is all very far-fetched, it triggers a cross-country car ride to Cali involving Arvilla, her two pals, and her husband’s 1966 Pontiac Bonneville. During their slow-paced old-timer's cruise through the American West, they befriend a young male vagabond in Utah’s Salt Flats, meet a folksy old trucker (Tom Skerritt), and generally have a lot of tame G-rated fun.
But there is a serious (read: tedious) self-discovery side to all this as you can imagine, where the original impetus for the trip becomes secondary to dipping into the fountain of youth for one last time. In the movie’s defense, it does try at times to eventually move beyond hokey sentimentality and put some serious issues on the table. But mostly this is just fluffy cinematic comfort fare and doesn’t really have any major pretentions to be much else. Not Recommended.