Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 25, 2009 4:20 pm 
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SEX, NICE SHEETS: MERYL AND ALEC AS A DIVORCED COUPLE BACK IN BED TOGETHER

It's not complicated enough

It's Complicated is pleasant enough but goes nowhere. A long-divorced couple (Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin) gets back together for a fling, much to the confusion of their four young adult kids. Along the way the entry of another eligible male divorce doesn't so much complicate things as merely allow the glitzy Hollywood "Nora Ephron lite" romantic comedy trappings -- the flashy cars, the too-perfect houses, the well-off people -- to absorb our attention and avoid going deep into the many layered feelings a couple might indeed feel upon reuniting after ten years apart.

Baldwin left Streep for a younger woman a decade ago, but he's sick of his new wife's obsession with getting pregnant and her little kid is a pain in the neck. Meryl giggles a lot, gets high, goes along with the huffing and puffing of full-of-himself Alec, who keeps turning up for sex and baring his hairy chest. Apparently in this great reunion he hasn't thought very far beyond worry-free sex. Then along comes a sweet architect, a lonely divorced person like Meryl, played by Steve Martin. But Martin is miscast. He initially seems gay. Even toward the end when he declares that it didn't feel right with Meryl, I thought he was going to say it was because he preferred men.

There's some conventional farce that works okay, notably a sequence where Meryl and Alec's secret tryst in a hotel is accidentally observed by their eldest son (the able and game John Krasinski, of Away We Go), and a graduation party for their younger boy (twinky Hunter Parrish) when Meryl, Alec, and Steve all get hilariously and hugely stoned on new, high grade weed they're not used to. As the younger daughter the many-coiffed Zoe Kazan gets short, straight blond hair this time; but except for Krasinski, the kids are just interchangeable pawns on the board.

At the center of things is Meryl, the white queen, a woman who's got her own chic bakery business (a downgrade from playing Julia Child) and, thanks to Hollywood, lives in a house worth many millions whose kitchen so perfect it's hard to figure out why Steve Martin has to come in to design an addition making it much bigger -- for a lady whose last child is now going away to college.

Nancy Meyers is known for relationship comedies that gently satirize men and provide some laughs. Previous successes are What Women Want (2000) and Something's Gotta Give (2003); in success level this one rates somewhere between these two. Polished stuff; but this time the finale is pretty weak, and not so much complicated as simply muddled and inconsequential, much ado about nothing. The only resolution is that the new addition to Meryl's house is still going to get built, and Steve Martin is still on the job for it, even if none of the dating worked out. This sugary fluff opened, appropriately, on Christmas Day. What you can say is that Baldwin holds his own as an attention-getter opposite Streep. She seems to have pushed the giggle button and never shut it off, which makes for very little variety; this is a sad letdown after her amusing turn this year as Julia Child.

N.B.: Filmleaf has a new address.

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