Review: ‘Ticket to Paradise’ has Julia Roberts and George Clooney, and that’s enough To justify the film’s Oscar nomination
Oscars: “Ticket to Paradise” was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film along with “Blue Is the Warmest Color”
“Ticket to Paradise” is an Oscar contender, and it’s a welcome one. A welcome because the story of the relationship between two French friends, who in turn fall in love, offers rare treats in cinema’s art of romance. A welcome because the film’s star, Julia Roberts, is very much the romantic in her own right, offering a refreshingly honest portrayal of a person who isn’t afraid to show her vulnerability. And a welcome because the film’s two male protagonists, George Clooney and Bill Murray, are perfectly cast, and the pair have a chance to display their considerable chemistry without ever becoming too stiff.
It’s just too bad this is an American-shot film, since the idea of a French man falling in love with a woman he’s never met is pretty strange. How could that happen? I can only imagine the kind of things that would happen in a French office.
The plot takes place in France, where the lovers are students at a school for the deaf. They have a rocky start but find friendship and the ability to communicate that make their love inevitable.
The idea was pretty great, and Clooney does an excellent job playing the character of the deaf guy, a man whose love for his hearing lover can only be compared to George Michael’s, who, like Clooney’s character, is a guy who can’t hear a thing when it happens. That being said, Clooney’s character is much more well-dressed and has a more polished look to him than Murray’s character, who, like the real Bill Murray, is about as plain as they come. They are both very good actors.
I had the opposite problem at the theater, where George Clooney’s character was very well disguised as a woman pretending to be a man. I thought: “Oh, that was an odd choice of disguise, but I’ll just have to roll with it,” but I was wrong. I should have known that
