Let’s get the preliminaries over with: Ticket to Paradise, starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney as a divorced and estranged couple who reunite in Bali to stop their daughter from going through with an unsuitable marriage, is a pretty terrible movie. It has ample co-star chemistry, pretty vacation vistas, and nothing else to recommend it as a romantic comedy — no wit, no storytelling skill, no surprises, no unexpected subplots, no interesting supporting characters, nothing, nada, zilch. It’s an elevator pitch that somehow became a movie without anyone bothering to flesh the story out, a throwback “rom-com” made by people whose knowledge of the genre in its heyday seems to derive from Wikipedia summaries. If you’re lucky you will laugh three times in the course of 104 minutes; if not, you might smile a little once.

However, that doesn’t mean that the movie is without a certain cultural interest, especially if you’re inclined to look for reactionary subtexts in unexpected places.

Start with class analysis. David and Georgia, the Clooney and Roberts characters, are faintly obnoxious arch-meritocrats: He’s some sort of New York architect, she’s some sort of Los Angeles gallery owner, and together they have one perfect precious offspring, the stressed-out Lily (the talented Kaitlyn Dever, wasted), who is graduating from some sort of prestigious higher-education institution and heading off to a grueling big-law-firm job, with the Bali trip as a brief vacation in between. (It’s a small testament to the general laziness of the movie that her age and professional destination suggest that she’s graduated from law school but the script keeps referring to “college” instead.)

But then, fate intervenes: A handsome Balinese seaweed farmer named Gede (Maxime Bouttier) fishes Lily and her sloppier best friend, Wren (the talented Billie Lourd, wasted), out of the ocean after a scuba trip goes wrong, and it’s love at first sight. A month later the parents are invited to their wedding and asked to contemplate the prospect of their perfect daughter tossing away her perfect résumé, her law-firm job, all her cursus honorum prospects, for a life in a beautiful place with a husband making his living with his hands.

There is a better movie that would really dig into the tensions here, that wouldn’t shy away from the reality of class difference (instead of giving Gede an oceanfront house that looks like a hotel cabin with the bookshelves of a grad student), that might even dig into, D. H. Lawrence–style, the erotic thrill of the unsuitable man. Since Ticket to Paradise is a bad movie, we get none of that — but we do get a blithe fantasy of ditching the meritocracy, burying the girlboss so the beachfront wife might live, that’s somewhat interesting in and of itself.

Then extend the cultural analysis to issues of family and faith. The movie’s American family is splintered, divorced parents with a single daughter, entirely secular so far as we can see. The Balinese family that welcomes Lily as a bride-to-be is sprawling, multigenerational, steeped in tradition, talking easily about living in harmony with nature and their gods, with a wedding ceremony carried out by a bearded priest in a language the Americans can’t understand. Obviously Hollywood isn’t going to make a romantic comedy about a secular American woman who marries into a clan of Latin Mass Catholics, but Trouble in Paradise is the exotic equivalent — basically a return-to-tradition story where tradition has all the best beaches, temples, and sunsets on its side.

Finally there’s the Georgia–David story, which of course tends toward their reconciliation, but which flips the old Parent Trap script by making Georgia the one who has the age-inappropriate significant other (a French airline pilot, played with himbo charm by Lucas Bravo), while David sleeps alone. But if Georgia is thoroughly modern and having it all, she’s also the one with the deeper doubts about her life, confessing to her ex that she fled the marriage because she was afraid of losing her professional self, and favoring her daughter’s inappropriate marriage more than David does because she seems to regret her own more career-minded decisions.

Again, there’s no real excavation of these issues, no nuance or complication; they just sit there in the script. But because they’re there, you can squint at Ticket to Paradise and see not just an extremely unfunny comedy of remarriage, but a strange fantasy for Boomer parents — feeding on their regret over the roads not taken, their unhappiness over the meritocracy’s demands, their sorrow that their own unmarried twentysomething or thirtysomething kids emphatically aren’t taking the Balinese option or any familial option at all.

This is a pretty dark reading of the Boomer psyche. But contemplating that darkness is the only thing that lends the bright images of Ticket to Paradise any interest whatsoever.