Nancy Meyers (2009)

Maybe the writer-director Nancy Meyers got her basic plot idea from The Philadelphia Story, where the bride-to-be eventually dumps her dull engineer fiancé and gets remarried to the irresistible cad from whom she’s divorced.   In It’s Complicated, Jane Adler has an affair with her egocentric but supposedly hard-to-deny ex-husband Jake.  This occurs before (and during) a relationship with a new man in her life, a mild-mannered architect called Adam Schaffer (who’s designing an unnecessary extension to Jane’s vast kitchen).  Meyers appears to think it wouldn’t do to have a simple happy ending.  Jane is too experienced in life for that; only a few minutes before the final credits the door seems to have closed gently on her relationship with both men.   The tentatively hopeful postscripts Meyers then supplies are tacked on without conviction.

The fundamental premise of It’s Complicated  – that people in late middle age having sex/getting drunk/smoking pot is a comedy per se – is feeble and pretty embarrassing.  When Jane takes off her robe, Jake is so overcome that he has a dizzy spell and keels over.  A doctor has to be called and there’s a run-through of Jake’s various medication (including the tablets for prostate trouble).  Much of the time, the couple’s three kids, in their twenties, seem to regard their parents as lovable curiosities – that is until the point at which they have to lurch into tearful concern about them.  And Meyers (who’s sixty) seems depressingly clear and unambitious about her target audience – middle-class, middle-aged women.  (The characters in It’s Complicated are professional or business people – Jake is a lawyer, Jane owns and runs a successful bakery:  money being no object is taken for granted, and certainly isn’t mined for comedy.)  The sequences in which Jane and her fifty-something ‘girlfriends’ whoop and cackle about sex and marriage, are hard to take.  The risqué tone of the proceedings is exquisitely shallow – as the mellow, innocuous score by Hans Zimmer and Heitor Pereira keeps reassuring you.   But the main performers make the film a pleasure in spite of itself – and in spite of the fact that you’re so disengaged from the story you’re enjoying them in the abstract.

There’s a particular danger in flimsy material like this that Meryl Streep, because of her supernatural technical command, will seem to be playing an actress who is playing a woman in a marital comedy.  The character of Jane, on paper, isn’t any kind of a stretch for her.  There’s plenty of detail and perfect timing to enjoy (like the moment when Jane dismisses Jake from a family meal, he exits trying and failing to catch her eye, the door shuts behind him and she looks up).  But Meryl Streep gives a performance that’s not only greatly accomplished but mostly very charming.  She looks her age here but also, perhaps consequently, beautiful in a different, transparent way – I kept seeing her younger self (glimpses of the way she looked nearly thirty years ago), an experience I don’t remember having before.  All this culminates in Jane’s final scene with Jake, as they talk together on a swing seat in her garden – Streep seems exhausted and open, and the effect is lovely and touching.    Nancy Meyers hardly deserves the unexpected depth that Meryl Streep gives to the aging theme in It’s Complicated but I’m glad she gets it.

The principal men here are a self-centred user and someone unassertive to the point of wimpiness.  Jake is an emotional bully:  the great merit of Alec Baldwin’s performance is that he doesn’t hold back on expressing this but still gets across Jake’s egoistic charm.  Baldwin has a funny portly grace and does great things with his eyes (not so much come-to-bed as come-to-bed-or-else eyes).  Steve Martin is relatively wasted as the architect; in some of his early scenes he doesn’t suggest enough going on under Adam’s bland exterior.   Still, it’s worth waiting for what Martin does to elevate the pot-smoking sequence from its mediocre conception.  After the party where they’re stoned (a graduation party for her son), Jane and Adam go to her patisserie and she bakes chocolate croissants – this midnight feast has an aphrodisiac spirit which Julie and Julia could have used a bit more of.   Martin’s chemistry with Streep, both comic and romantic, is good (as is Baldwin’s).  As Jane and Jake’s son-in-law, John Krasinski is excellent – he’s polished and natural and he has great timing:  he hits the target with every look and every line.  The three children don’t register much – although it was interesting to see Zoe Kazan, even in a sketchy role like this, only weeks after enjoying her work in Me and Orson Welles.  (The other daughter is played by Caitlin Fitzgerald and the son by Hunter Parrish.)  Lake Bell can’t do much with the thankless role of Agness, the (much) younger woman Jake left Jane for.  This character seems altogether wrong:  you don’t believe that a self-server like Jake would get involved with a woman as obviously challenging as Agness.  Jane’s gruesome friends are played by Mary Kay Place, Alexandra Wentworth and Rita Wilson.

13 and 29 January 2010