I think a lot of people -- particularly the older women it was designed for -- would be insulted by It's Complicated, the latest cashmere and calla lily-scented effusion to waft from the mind of Nancy Meyers, if the director took her DKNY boot off their jugulars long enough for it to occur to them. A big part of Meyers's appeal is her obsessively upscale aesthetic, and the pull she creates toward a cozy, kooky, family-based world of privileged comfort, beauty and affluence is formidable: she wants you to give in, you want to give in -- where's the harm? Well, it's in her blithely loathsome characters, to begin with, but also in her blinkered notion of escapist cinema: not everyone is willing to relax into Meyers's Sonoma-scapes of domestic abundance the way, say, Depression-era moviegoers flocked to see Carole Lombard cracking wise in feathers and furs; the element of fantasy and aspiration is a harder sell in a culture where class striations have perhaps never been quite so raw. Personally, despite my best efforts to settle in and surrender to the "softness" Meyers seems so hell-bent on, the crudeness of the filmmaking and fatuous dedication to cliché kept jerking me back into my itchy street clothes and worn out shoes. Quel dommage pour moi!
A "personal" filmmaker the way Martha Stewart is a "homemaker," Meyers is now famous for pulling both kitchen tiles and divorce scars from her own life and putting them on screen. In It's Complicated, we have a 50-something Santa Barbara woman named Jane (Meryl Streep) who owns her own bakery, has three children, and has been divorced for 10 years from her husband Jake (Alec Baldwin), who left Jane for a young woman named Agness (Lake Bell, who gets exactly one shot, late in the film, that suggests her character's veins might flow with something besides venom). The day before their son's graduation in New York, Jane and Jake have a drunken round of oopsy sex; a sloppy affair, no actual hard (or difficult) feelings, and a whole lot of body-focused laugh cues ensue.
Baldwin luxuriates in his role as the giddy adulterer, mugging, preening and simpering as though his next meal depended on it. "O.M.G., I thought he'd never leave," he purrs at Jane's door late one night, having staked out her dinner with an architect named Adam (Steve Martin, white as grits and not quite as flavorful). And it's funny, you'll laugh: Ha ha, Alec Baldwin is a funny guy. But the film's moments of genuine mirth -- and there are a bunch of them -- are almost always discrete and actor-driven, amounting to not much more than trailer fodder. John Krasinski plays similarly well to his strengths (strength?) as priceless reaction shot guy, but Meyers uses him -- as she does all of her actors -- as a talking prop that serves a purpose in a scene or seven. Streep is obviously least well-served by this utilitarian approach to both screenwriting and directing, and here must serve as conduit for the familiar gamut of Meyers-ian set pieces: submitting one's sags to a plastic surgeon; covering those same sags in the presence of a man; packing up the candlelit dinner she prepared after being blown off by her date; throwing one's head back in guffaw after guffaw of utter, incandescent amusement.
In one of the best, loosest scenes, Jane soaks in a bathtub while Jake hangs out on the floor, and the two gibe and goose each other with a natural balance of tension and ease that is the film's first and only indication that these two actually lived together for twenty years. If it weren't for the perfectly sculpted range of bubbles across Streep's breasts, I would have sworn the scene was shot while Meyers was off sourcing orchids. The rest is an ostensibly soothing assembly of montage-driven clichés, including older ladies drinking white zin and making confidences, older lady puttering in her ridiculously fecund garden, older lady showing her date how to make chocolate croissants, older lady being told she looks hotter than usual (cause she's getting laid!), and an older guy who stupidly left his perfect family-unit staring in the window, outside in the cold, as they all sit down to a gloriously appointed meal. Meyers's chops do nothing to make this reheated fare more palatable: noted for her excessive coverage and multiple takes, Meyers still can't seem to match her shots; the cuts are often jarring and the look and framing barely reach three-camera sitcom standards.
But your mom doesn't care about that, and you might not either. The truth is that, with several glaring exceptions (I didn't need to see anyone reach between La Streep's legs and sigh, "Home, sweet home"), the anesthetically pleasurable experience of watching It's Complicated and that of thinking about it afterward are two very different things. The air's thin up there in Meyer-ville, and lighter heads are the whole idea.