Wednesday, December 23, 2009
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Wednesday, December 23, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW
It's Complicated
Ah, The Joys Of Matrimonial Upheaval.
Perfectly Tricky!
Meryl Streep as Jane and Steve
Martin as Adam in Nancy Meyers' "It's Complicated", opening on Christmas Day.
Universal
By
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
"It's Complicated" has its funny and very enjoyable moments but Nancy Meyers'
new comedy about the misfortunes, complexities and joys of romance suffers from
what Ms. Meyers' films always seem to suffer from: a lack of depth and character
development. In this latest farce, which opens across the U.S. and Canada
on Christmas Day, Meryl Streep is Jane, a Santa Barbara bakery owner who has
been happily divorced from Jake (Alec Baldwin) for ten years.
The two meet again at random and before you can say, "let's go to bed to relive
the good times", there they are: Jane and Jake, in the afterglow. Their
marriage produced three grown kids, including bride-to-be Lauren (Caitlin
Fitzgerald) who is engaged to Harley (John Krasinski). The kids are
smarter than their parents and after all, it's a new century, and this is not
their (or your) parents' marriage -- it's their parents' ex-marriage,
ten years hence, often played out in a series of fantastically shallow if not
utterly ridiculous episodes.
And when Adam, a divorced architect (Steve Martin) is hired to build an extra
wing onto Jane's empty-nested house, things get more slippery. Messier
still, Jake these days is married to Agness (Lake Bell), a non-stop ball-buster
of a wife, one so-cartoonish to the extreme that -- naïveté aside -- you
couldn't believe such a person truly exists. Agness is some 25 years
younger than Jake, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that Ms. Meyers, who
recently turned 60, is making a personal statement about the younger woman in
her screenplay. (Agness also has a child, Pedro, who is the whipping boy
of a number of the film's unfunny jokes.) You wonder why Jake married her
in the first place. It's hard to suspend disbelief when a film lacks so
much intelligence. After all, there's comedy and then there's smart
comedy.
Acting-wise, Ms. Streep excels as usual but Jane hasn't the fortitude to make
the right decisions in life. Jane's far smarter than the script shows but
for the director perhaps a saving grace is that in life choices, emotion and
love don't have intellect in common. Despite this, "It's Complicated"
suffers not due to acting -- Mr. Krasinski is great comic relief as Harley --
but because Ms. Meyers' screenplay wanders awkwardly from one situation into
another. Jake lacks mooring as a character. Like his male
predecessor in Ms. Meyers' 2003 film "Something's Gotta Give" Jake tests, or
flirts with clothes-less waters. He's aimless, needy and still a teenage
boy in some respects. Maybe that's the point: that in many a woman's world
men like this exist each minute of a lifetime.
In the final analysis audiences will likely wish to see additional interaction
between Ms. Streep and Mr. Martin. Their moments onscreen are more sincere
and interesting than the unrepaired family fractures the film spends much time
on. Had Ms. Meyers' story invested more in the dynamics between them,
"It's Complicated" would have been better focused and 30 minutes shorter.
Instead, Jane's and Adam's priceless episodes together are compressed into the
narrative -- alas -- almost lost amidst a sea of stick-figures, the kind we've
seen too many times before.
With: Zoe Kazan (her third film in as many weeks, after
"The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee" and
"Me And Orson Welles"), Mary Kay
Place,
“It's Complicated” is
rated R by the Motion Picture Association Of America for some drug content and
sexuality. The
film’s duration is one hour and 58 minutes.
Read more movie reviews and stories from Omar
here.
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