But any way you look at it, director Michael Lembeck’s indie offering is bound to please nearly anyone in its target demographic who isn’t easily offended by unmistakable indications that, as the old saying goes, although there’s snow on the roof, fire can still burn in the hearth.
Ellen Burstyn heads the unusually strong cast of familiar faces as Helen Wilson, a fiercely independent retired schoolteacher who — much to the dismay of Laura , her slightly control-freakish daughter — is determined to keep living in the spacious house where she shared so many good times with her three-years-deceased husband.
Shortly after she settles in at Pine Grove Senior Community, Helen runs into the unofficial rulers of the roost: much-married Margot , “are like mean girls, but with medical alert bracelets.” When a fourth member of the geriatric clique conveniently dies, however, there is an opening at the card table.
Janet, a chronic sourpuss with a touch of Iago about her, periodically commits malicious mischief to complicate things, leading to a third-act revelation that seems cribbed from a turn-of-the-century romcom.
On the other hand, there are good reasons why many of those decades-old sitcoms remain enduringly popular on cable TV, not the least of which being the potent chemistry of their casts.
There are about a dozen different ways “Queen Bees” could have soured into something unbearably silly and condescending — like, say, 2017’s unfortunate “Just Getting Started” — while dealing with the diminished physical abilities and unabated physical desires of its older characters.