It's Complicated
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010, 9:50 pm
It's Complicated was pretty much what I expected it to be, and I liked
it about as much as I thought I would (two stars of five, and again, that's
purely subjective, but I'll get into that below). Briefly: Jane (Meryl
Streep), ten years divorced from Jake (Alec Baldin, and what a time people must
have had reading Nancy Meyers's screenplay with Jane and Jake getting every
other line -- then again, since she wrote and directed, maybe nobody else
needed to read it), suddenly finds things rekindled with him at the same time
that she starts falling for Adam, the architect responsible for building
additions on her house. Add three grown kids (including Hunter Parrish, who plays
Silas on Weeds, and don't think that didn't distract me all movie long)
and you've got ... well, you've got a movie.
Things were as unsentimental as I hoped, the jokes were often solid (John
Krasinski, as the fiance of the oldest daughter, gets a memorable scene having
lunch at a hotel where Jane and Jake are liaising), and the story was told with
little wasted motion, but in the end, I wonder if this is one of those movies
where I legitimately suffered from not being in the target audience. After
all, someone loved it -- the picture was nominated for Best Comedy or
Musical at the Golden Globes, and Meyers's screenplay also took a nomination.
(Meryl Streep was nominated too, but she could wander around midtown Manhattan
in a paper sack and get a nomination for it at this point. It's almost pro
forma. Not that I'm complaining, really, because she fully inhabits every
character she plays despite basically being the only woman of her age that
Hollywood can turn to on these matters. She's remarkable, really.) Having no
experience being divorced, having no experience being old, having no experience
with the onset of the empty nest, perhaps I just couldn't identify with Jane
and Jake. I'd like to say that the movie should have drawn me in anyway, that
I find ways to get involved with lots of characters who are nothing like me,
but maybe in this kind of movie, it's forgiveable.
I guess in part I'm being wary of leveling too much criticism at Meyers, who
is, after all, the only person in Hollywood who does what she does. Movies
don't shoot for the 40+ female demographic (or the 40+ demographic at all, for
that matter), and as someone who hopes to be 40+ someday, and hopes to be
married to a 40+ female at the time, I'd like to think that when I get there,
there will be movies made for me.
I don't know. It's a debate for me whether it was really me being half Alec
Baldwin's age that made me fail to identify with Jake or whether it was
actually Meyers's screenplay and direction and the editing of Joe Hutshing and
David Moritz that took me out of the story. Were there too many distractingly
strange shots (like one of Alec Baldwin about halfway through that suddenly
centered him in the frame and had him deliver his line full-on to the camera,
putting us much more literally in Jane's shoes than anything before or after
asked us to be) or was I easily distracted? Did the editing in the first third
of the movie somehow manage to kill every single joke or was that humor
just not written for me? Was the utter perfection of Jane and Jake's family
(the three adult children are as close as can be, with constant smiles and
chirpy remarks) distracting to everyone or was I just not able to disappear
into the escapist fantasy from my own flawed family life?
If you're not in the generation above mine, if you don't have kids, if you or
your friends aren't divorced, will you like the movie? And does it matter if
you do? Like I said, I don't know.
That's a crummy way to end a blog post, but that's why I'm a blogger and not a
professional.
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