A September-September Romance
In the pleasurable, daffy if at times daft “It’s Complicated,” Meryl Streep plays Jane Adler, a successful restaurateur who’s about to nest happily alone in an upscale Southern California coastal community, or so it seems. Divorced with three adult children who enjoy her company (the middle one is just moving out), Jane lives in a large house on a lush sprawl surrounded by trees and no visible neighbors. It’s such a bucolic vision you half expect a few deer, a couple of bunnies and the bluebird of happiness to swing by for a visit and a quick song. Instead you get Rita Wilson trilling support as one of Jane’s close friends.
“It’s Complicated” was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, a Hollywood filmmaker who makes female-specific indulgences that, at their irresistible best, are testaments to the power of fairy tales. Like her finest film, “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003), this new one revolves around a woman in late middle age, who, after years of going it alone in bed and out, suddenly becomes sexually and romantically involved with two very different men. What kinks up “It’s Complicated” ever so slightly is that one of the two suitors here is Jane’s former husband, Jake (Alec Baldwin), an unreconstructed womanizer now married to the much-younger Agness (Lake Bell), a hard-bellied beauty with abs and smiles of steel.
Those intimidating abs are as important to Agness’s outsider status in the story as the kooky spelling of her name, which stands out next to the reassuringly ordinary Jane, Jake and the fourth wheel, Adam (Steve Martin), who also catches Jane’s eye. Agness enters belly first, sashaying into the opening scene as the camera and Jane both fix on Agness’s stomach, an image that underscores her fertility while also reducing her to a body part (and lopping off her head). “Something’s Gotta Give” opens on a similar thematic note with images of sylphlike young beauties striding across the screen, their legs slicing the frame. We have met the enemy, Ms. Meyers seems to be suggesting, and she is firmer — and younger.
Younger, perhaps, but never better, at least in Meyersland. One of the most interesting things about Ms. Meyers’s romances is that they are pitched at a niche demographic, by which I mean women over 40. Ms. Streep looks sensational, but she and her crinkles also look close enough to her real age (60) to reassure you that she hasn’t resorted to the knife. That may sound grotesque and petty. But in an industry in which actresses whittle themselves down to nothing so they can have a little screen space only to fade away once they hit a certain age, there’s nothing trivial about a movie that insists a middle-aged woman with actual breasts and hips and wrinkles can be beautiful and desirable while also fully desiring.
Jane’s lust (and lustiness) kicks in after she and Jake land in New York to attend the college graduation of their youngest, Luke (Hunter Parrish). After a coincidental meeting at a bar, the parents end up drinking and dancing the night away, capping their giddy evening with an off-screen bout between the sheets. Afterward a grinning Jake enthuses over the encounter, a recap that a stunned-looking Jane answers by vomiting. But if Jane has doubts, which she shares through Ms. Meyers’s customary stream of babble, the heart or maybe the head wants what it wants. Whatever the case, Jane and Jake continue their affair back home, sneaking around while their children, as well as Agness and Adam remain oblivious.
Ms. Meyers and her interviewers like to invoke the comedies of Ernst Lubitsch (“The Shop Around the Corner”) as one of her inspirations. But watching a Grand Prix race doesn’t make you a Formula One champion. Her cinematographers tend to be first rate (John Toll shot this one), yet Ms. Meyers doesn’t have her own visual signature. What she does have is a kind of upmarket taste and the means to translate it onto the screen. Here, as in the other films she has directed, the camera is little more than a machine that takes nicely lighted pictures of the designer items, the actors included, which she has amassed and, with the exacting attention of an interior decorator, prettily arranged inside the frame.
At the same time there’s no doubt that she is an auteur, in that the films she has directed, including “What Women Want” and “The Holiday,” express a personal vision. Being an auteur isn’t simply a matter of what you do with the camera and why; among other things, pacing also counts (and Ms. Meyers has very good comic timing when it comes to banter) as do the performances. The movie’s best moments may be, to borrow a thought from Andrew Sarris, appreciated as exquisite whimsy (he was talking about a 1935 romantic comedy), but even in such whimsy, Mr. Sarris reminds us, a director’s touch can be “immortalized as a figure of style.”
Ms. Meyers’s vision can be maddeningly narrow and not only because her movies take place in cosseted, largely white worlds where the help is discreetly out of view. Both “It’s Complicated” and “Something’s Gotta Give” center on an independent woman whose life, despite all its personal and professional markers, immediately expands — even as it shrinks — once a man starts rocking her bed and head. Before her first adulterous night with Jake, Jane is a melancholy solo act, whether she’s weeping in her kitchen after her daughter moves out or trading somewhat desperately raunchy sex jokes with her girlfriends. Jake’s attentions give Jane snap, vibrancy, some color in her cheeks and, most important, a comic foil. Jake, in other words, turns her into a Nancy Meyers character.
In “It’s Complicated” Ms. Meyers transforms a divorced couple into a romantic couple, which suggests a belief in love enduring even after a marriage dies. That sounds wonderfully romantic or a prescription for pathology, maybe both. Whatever the balance between madness and madcap, classic screwball comedies involve a woman and a man meeting on the battlefield or in a newspaper office and sparring their way into coupledom. Ms. Meyers wants, as her title implies, to complicate that formula. But no matter how liberating some of her conceits, notably the older heroine, her embrace of sexist stereotypes, including male characters as agents of narrative change, keep her and her female characters down.
And yet ... much as Diane Keaton did in “Something’s Gotta Give,” Ms. Streep, mugging wildly if winningly, takes this character and makes you love her, just as Mr. Baldwin does with Jake, who, with his shark smiles and thrusting gut, beautifully conveys male vanity in its twilight. Jane may be too perfectly dressed, coiffed and housed to be plausible. But Ms. Streep makes you believe in Jane, or rather makes you want to believe in her, from her casually chic wardrobe to the indulgent smiles she bestows on her children and lovers, all of whom need nurturing. The truth is that everyone needs a little coddling, which could be the key to Ms. Meyers’s peculiar talent: She pampers her audience shamelessly.
“It’s Complicated” is rated R. (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.) Some tame nuzzling and a little pot smoking.
IT’S COMPLICATED
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written and directed by Nancy Meyers; director of photography, John Toll; edited by Joe Hutshing and David Moritz; music by Hans Zimmer and Heitor Pereira; production designer, Jon Hutman; produced by Ms. Meyers and Scott Rudin; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes.
WITH: Meryl Streep (Jane), Steve Martin (Adam), Alec Baldwin (Jake), Lake Bell(Agness), John Krasinski (Harley), Rita Wilson (Trisha), Mary Kay Place (Joanne), Alexandra Wentworth (Diane) and Hunter Parrish (Luke).
