directed by Zara Hayes, with Diane Keaton, Jacki Weaver, Rhea Perlman, Pam Grier
This is a sad movie, on multiple levels.
First, it's sad from the beginning, not because its protagonist, Martha (Diane Keaton), is an older single woman with no children who reaches the age at which it's no longer smart to live alone in the city. It's sad because the film finds her trying to sell off her belongings on the street in New York. Haven't we've all seen the news stories about how grown children don't want to inherit their parents' antiques? Haven't we been through it ourselves? Or heard the stories of adults faced with the overwhelming task of disposing of a lifetime of accumulated furnishings, papers, and clothing in the wake of a parent's death? Of people begging thrift stores or consignment shops or the Salvation Army to take the things they used to take and being refused? Articles about great historic finds like photographs and scrapbooks and audio recordings being rescued from trash bins? So watching her futile little sales efforts are already sad. We watch her lower her prices, practically give items away then have things hauled away so she can clear out of her apartment.
But Martha has packed up for a new life, and has gotten behind the wheel for a sun-dappled drive down the 95 to Atlanta to take up residence in a 55-plus retirement housing community. Things seem to be looking up, as the community offers numerous amenities, activities, active neighbors, security, and a beautiful house for Martha to live in. But Martha's a sourpuss with a not-so-secret secret. She scowls, smirks, and shakes off attempts by residents to embrace her, informing them that she's come there to die. In the moment of the quip, it seems funny only it's not. We know at this point that Martha has canceled all of her New York City doctor appointments and is refusing chemotherapy, so she's decided to just ... die. And not tell anyone.
Though she initially resists her wacky, live-out-loud neighbor Sheryl (Jacki Weaver), she gets sucked into a friendship based on their flouting of the community's many rules. The film's attempts to build comedy around the community's hysterical by-the-numbers Southern belle directress Vicki (Celia Weston), the hen-pecked bumbling security captain (Bruce McGill), and elderly deputy are just desperate and ... sad. There's that word again.
As it happens, Martha has held on to her high school cheerleading outfit and confesses that she never became the cheerleader she once dreamed of being. Next thing you know, in an effort to live out her dreams, give the ladies something to do, and also backhandedly stick it to the community's rules on club-forming, Martha is auditioning and rehearsing a group of sprightly senior cheerleaders, a group that also includes recently widowed Alice (Rhea Perlman), married Olive (Pam Grier), and Helen (Phyllis Somerville), whose life is over-managed by a overbearing, meddlesome adult son.
In another review of this film, the reviewer complained that Poms was wrongheaded for trying to sex up these old ladies with pom poms and short skirts, equating their efforts with a misguided attempt, both by the women and the Hollywood machine portraying them, to seem young and sexy again. But this view is totally off-base. First, this presumes that older women, by definition, are NOT sexy. Cheerleading for these ladies is about agency, about bucking conventions and stereotypes about what it means to be an older woman. And it's about injecting fun back into their lives. The movie could have been about older women riding horses or cliff diving or playing competitive poker and the message would be the same.
One of the most misguided aspects of this script is that Martha's cheerleaders are narratively pitted against a team of high school cheerleaders, who employ mean girl tactics against the seniors as if they are their equals, which is ridiculous. Don't these girls have mothers, aunties, and grandmothers? Where is the respect? They threaten one of the mean girls with exposure to her parents about a wild party that trashed her house, and get her to coach their team. As if!
The movie is presented as a comedy, and it tries to milk the situation for cheap gags about grannies who drink, gamble, defy their husbands, grown kids and other authority figures, and about the seemingly frivolous lives and petty concerns of seniors with time on their hands. But we never come to understand how or why Martha winds up alone in this community. Also the other actresses in the squad have little to do in the film. Rhea Perlman is underutilized as a woman finally freed from her husband's edicts, and poor Pam Grier is completely wasted. The movie doesn't really examine the perils and challenges of growing older or of facing down infirmity, or even delve into the risks and benefits of cheerleading for this crew. It could have been done in a clever way, but these issues are glossed over.
To me, the saddest part of Poms is that for a film about a group of senior cheerleaders who gain a sense of self-esteem, identity, and even respect for engaging in this high school activity, their final performance routine was so dang underwhelming. I know that they are seniors, women in their 60s up to their 80s. They were not going to do handsprings, cartwheels, towers, dives, or other athletic or bone-fracturing moves. But their choreography is basic, boring, uncoordinated, and ... sad. No one on this silver squad has any sense of rhythm, apparently. I love Diane Keaton as an actress, but all she has going for her here is enthusiasm. So much more could have been done with the choreography to brighten it up; even the director and the cinematographer seem to know how awful it is by panning the camera around so that we only see bits and pieces of their triumphant performance at a cheerleading competition.
In the end, it's not about having the ladies win the competition. It's about their camaraderie, their efforts to exert control over their bodies and their circumstances. As the tagline says, "It's never too late to follow your dreams." But Poms could have been a stronger vehicle for that message.
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