It isn’t a hopeful sign when the song behind the credits and into the opening shots of Boynton Beach Bereavement Club is a Sinatra imitator singing “Love and Marriage.” Like this music, the characters and situations in Susan Seidelman’s movie are kind of musty, secondhand and slack.

In the early 1970s, Esquire magazine ran a piece imagining what various celebrities of the day would be like as old people. Accompanied by drawings imagining them as octogenarians, it broke them into two categories: good old people and bad old people. In the latter category was Barbra Streisand, drawn as a Margaret Dumont-ish dowager dripping with jewels and kvetching endlessly about her ailments.