‘Bachelors Club’ Serves a Jumble of Problems

“The Hungry Bachelors Club” is an undernourished romantic comedy-drama that’s especially short on that most essential ingredient: credibility. It takes its title from the name a young divorced woman named Delmar Youngblood (Jorja Fox) would like to give to the restaurant she dreams of opening. In the meantime she has a high-pressure job as an insurance adjuster and lives in a splendid, spacious turn-of-the-century residence with her small son, glamorous but vaguely dotty mother Hannibal (Candice Azzara) and best friend Hortense (Suzanne Mara).

Delmar’s brother Jethro (Peter Murnik) is a professor of anthropology with a specialty in Mayan culture, but his supreme passion is working on ‘50s Cadillacs. Jethro pals around with Marlon (David Shackelford), a hard-drinking slob and would-be writer who has the hots for Mara’s Hortense, who in turn is obsessed with Stanley (Paul Provenza), a good-looking mama’s boy who keeps postponing marriage.

Stanley, however, is also an ambitious attorney who has a proposition for Delmar: Be a surrogate mother for the wife of his boss (Michael Des Barres). She is to receive $25,000 if she agrees, and Stanley will be made a partner in the firm. Delmar sleeps on it, agrees while holding out for more money. In the meantime Jethro has befriended an ex-con, Moses (Bill Nunn).

When an elderly friend of Hannibal dies suddenly Jethro chants a Mayan ritual over her corpse. This so impresses her estranged adopted daughter Missy (Katherine Kendall), who’s haunted by memories of being sexually abused by her late adoptive father, that she snaps out of her cocaine addiction and falls for the professor.

All of this is as improbable as the characters’ cutesy-poo names. Hortense’s predicament in being caught between two highly problematic men is tedious; Jethro and Missy’s sudden romance and her even more abrupt salvation is hopelessly contrived and mechanical; and you know right off that Delmar’s surrogate mother gambit is going to misfire. All these people and problems crowd out the one possibility for the film to make sense, and that is in the relationship between Moses and Delmar.

At first we think we may be in for an “Imitation of Life” replay when Moses’ way with barbecue inspires Delmar to ask him to consider being the chef at her dreamed-of restaurant. Will he be the talented, loyal but ever-subordinate mainstay to Delmar’s venture? Or will he evolve into something more than that?

Moses, well-played by Nunn, by far the film’s most accomplished actor, and Delmar are the film’s heart, and had director Gregory Ruzzin (who made such a promising debut with “Blue Skies Are a Lie”) and his writers, working from a novel by Lynn Scott Myers, concentrated on them, they might have gotten somewhere. No one but Nunn really rises above the material, and “The Hungry Bachelors Club” remains an empty dish.

* MPAA rating: PG-13, for some mature thematic elements. Times guidelines: adult themes and situations.

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‘The Hungry Bachelors Club’

Jorja Fox: Delmar Youngblood

Bill Nunn: Moses Grady

Suzanne Mara: Hortense

Peter Murnik: Jethro Youngblood

A Taggart Transcontinental and Managed Passion Films presentation of a Mama’s Boy production. Director Gregory Ruzzin. Producers Dan Gifford and Amy Sommer. Executive producer Kimberly Becker. Screenplay by Fred Dresch and Ron Ratliff. Cinematographer Robert Smith. Supervising editors Stephen Myers and Andrew Frank. Music Larry Brown. Costumes Katie Saunders. Production designer Timothy Duffy. Production designer John Paino. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

At selected theaters.