Cookie-cutter comedy

It's Complicated, the new romantic comedy from ultra-successful director/producer/screenwriter Nancy Meyers (What Women Want, The Holiday), is yet another gutless fantasy designed to amuse a niche audience. Like the sort of drivel designed to reel in the teen demographic, Meyers' pictures are tailor-made to attract a specific audience, exploiting their collective insecurities and midlife crises and inviting women in particular to indulge in a bit of vicarious romance and vacuous hilarity.

Like 2003's Something's Gotta Give (starring Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson), It's Complicated focuses on the love lives of a wealthy white woman in her 50s and an overweight and unctuous wealthy white man having a prolonged midlife crisis. In this case, Meryl Streep's Jane, a self-reliant divorcée, is to Keaton's Erica Barry as Alec Baldwin's Jake is to Nicholson's philandering Harry Sanborn.

The more-or-less recycled storyline follows the self-doubt and angst Jane experiences when confronted with the much younger and prettier wife of her ex-husband, a successful womanizer and habitual liar with whom she once raised a family.

Woe is Jane, needless to say, and we are treated to an in-depth look at the many cruel, cruel difficulties of life for rich, single, attractive middle-aged women. It's just so hard comparing your looks to the younger women out there - or so we're led to believe. Unfortunately, such self-pity is less than heart-rending, at least for this critic (admittedly, not a middle-aged woman). Insecurity is an issue we all face, but the hand-wringing of such a vain and superficial protagonist - we're supposed to believe she's salt-of-the-earth because, after careful consideration, she decides not to have plastic surgery after all - simply doesn't inspire genuine empathy.   

And the film isn't very funny. As with Something's Gotta Give, we're treated to a steady stream of gags deriving their humor, or the lack thereof, from the indignities of sex between older people. In the earlier film, the humor was ostensibly provided by an exaggeratedly dumpy Nicholson (in an embarrassing turn for the gifted actor) in various states of undress. Baldwin (also talented) is even more revolting as he prances about patting his belly and bending over in front of webcams.    

Love will find a way, of course, and it isn't long before the formerly wed pair is taking in performances of the poor man's opera in various hotel rooms. Due to the irony of such infidelity (Jack is still married to the woman he left Jane for in the first place) and the sensitivity of their grown children, things become, er, complicated. Enter a challenger for Jane's affections (a subdued Steve Martin), and matters become more complicated still.

The performances are workmanlike, if not winning. Streep's Jane (a chef, incidentally) spends as much time in various kitchens as Julia Child in a role that taps the actress's much-lauded turn in last year's Julie & Julia to achieve a decidedly culinary theme. Baldwin and Martin phone in their performances, but, considering the script, they can be forgiven. Both, after all, are rather good even on a bad day. At any rate, no feats of acting would have redeemed It's Complicated from insignificance.   

Meyers' What Women Want was at one time the most financially successful film ever directed by a woman, and she has demonstrated the Midas touch with nearly every project with which she has been associated. One cannot help but suspect a certain amount of callousness in her artistic ambitions, however. Formularism tends to work at cross-purposes with earnestness in art. However much success Meyers enjoys at the box office, her credibility as a storyteller grows more dubious with each new film.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com