It's Complicated (2009)
Grade:B-
Writer/director Nancy Meyers perhaps wrote a more perfect-fit role for Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give than she has written for Meryl Streep in the equally-awful-titled It’s Complicated, but Meryl has that whole “indisputable acting legend at the height of her box office potency” thing going for her that Diane Keaton didn’t have when Something’s Gotta Give was released in 2003. So while Keaton’s movie provided the added pleasure of seeing a slightly-faded actress finding a role that perfectly suited her and reminded us why she was a legend in the first place, It’s Complicated instead features several durable stars at their best.
Alongside Streep’s Jane are Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin as her two love interests. Baldwin is Jack, Jane’s ex-husband of ten years, and Martin is Adam, the architect working on Jane’s kitchen remodel. Jack and Jane have been divorced for ten years, but have rekindled their love, and are now having an affair, even though Jack has married the quite-younger Agness (Lake Bell). Thrown in the mix are Jack and Jane’s three kids and their oldest daughter’s fiancé, a surrogate fourth child Harley (John Krasinski), who begins to find out way more than he can handle about Jack and Jane’s secret affair.
All pretty standard stuff, yes? This is certainly one of those films where if you’ve seen the trailer, you know exactly what you’re going to get from the film. Some misunderstandings, some delightfully loose Meryl acting, some shenanigans (oh, the shenanigans!), a conclusion that neatly ties everything together, and a super-clunky metaphor in Jane’s kitchen addition. The whole thing is just so glossy in the best and worst sense of the term. The production values are all solid, the performances are all just a notch or two above what is required of the actors, and the writing is funny in parts, but everything is so polished that it also comes across as slightly dull.
In fact, while I give Nancy Meyers due credit for filling a niche that is so often overlooked in mainstream cinema – that is, films that appeal to women of a certain age – she just isn’t a very great filmmaker. She has such an issue with pacing and timing with all of her films clocking in at least twenty minutes longer than they need to. Here, it’s as if all the deleted scenes were left in the final print, ostensibly because it’s such a joy to watch these actors do something fun, but ultimately it’s at the cost of the film. Not to say it’s detrimental to watch Martin, Baldwin, and Streep having a grand old time in front of the camera for just under two hours, but it gets to be a bit much at the end when it’s all too clear that things aren’t as complicated as everyone seems to think they are.
Roger Ebert has addressed one of Gene Siskel’s old criteria for judging a film frequently in his own writing: is the film more interesting to watch than a documentary of the people involved having lunch? The answer here is a resounding no. Jane runs a bakery, and so much of the film focuses on the family meals that she prepares for her family. For the majority of them, I wanted to watch the behind-the-scenes as the actors prepared for the cameras to role, chatting with each other about how wonderful they all are. That’s more interesting to me than the finished film, a sort of ode to a stock fantasy of middle-aged women: to really have it all, as it seems Jane does.
Indeed, who wouldn’t want to be in Jane’s position, where her gorgeous, page-35-of-the-Pottery-Barn-catalogue kitchen is something that she’s had to put up with for the past ten years? Where her three children are all gorgeous and successful? Where said children, upon hearing of Jane’s affair, console each other by cozying up in the same bed together because they get along with each other that well? Where Jane’s a successful, self-made businesswoman, doing something at which she’s clearly talented and successful?
I get that Meyers’s films deal with a specific WASPy (or here, I suppose, a WADPy) milieu, and I get that they exist primarily as escapism, but when you title your film It’s Complicated and the complications just don’t seem like that big a deal, it’s hard to take the film seriously. Ultimately, it’s a fun time in the theater, and Meyers can certainly write funny dialogue and funny scenes, but her ideas of problems for her characters ultimately seem distractingly trivial, leaving a bit of a sour taste once the credits roll.
Bottom Line:
It’s as good as you think it’s gonna be with the exact problems that you may fear it could have. It’s Complicated isn’t all that complicated, but it all goes down pretty easy, thanks to strong casting and some fun moments in the screenplay.
© 2004-2009 Ben Waldorf. Posted December 31, 2009. IMDB