Bateman plays an overanxious, complicated, sometimes downright annoying New Yorker whose best friend, the 40-ish Kassie (Aniston), has decided to have a baby on her own. Wally and Kassie dated briefly, an episode that happened so long ago it may as well have been part of a previous life. Now they're just extremely close: Kassie tolerates Wally's bizarre habits (like making strange, humming orgasmic sounds while he's enjoying his food); and he provides her with unconditional love and support. Though he's never been able to hang onto a girlfriend for very long, he's more devoted to her than some spouses would be.
So Wally finds himself mildly jealous when Kassie locates a superb male specimen sperm donor (played by a chiseled-from-plastic Patrick Wilson; his character is an adjunct professor at Columbia, and his specialty is "the feminist literary tradition"). One night, his judgment impaired by a potent pill-and-alcohol cocktail, Wally swaps his own sperm for that of the sensitive hunk. (A New York Magazine cover photo of Diane Sawyer proves to be the inspiration for the task at hand.) Then he blacks out and promptly forgets what happened. Kassie becomes pregnant, moves away, and returns to New York seven years later with an overanxious, complicated and sometimes very annoying little boy in tow.
The Switch is ostensibly aimed at women, who are historically sensitive to the loud tick-tocking of the biological clock. But the sneaky surprise of movie -- which was directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck (Blades of Glory) and adapted, by Allan Loeb, from a story by Jeffrey Eugenides -- is that it focuses more intently on the guy's point of view: What happens when a man who never set out to become a father realizes, six years after the fact, that he's inadvertently helped create a mini-me? That's got to mess with a guy's head.
The movie isn't about alternative families per se, although it does come off, for the most part, as affably open-minded. It doesn't make a big deal out of Kassie's decision to have a baby without a partner -- Bill O'Reilly, with his recent comments about how the movie's ideas are "destructive to our society," has done more to draw attention to that angle than anything that actually appears in the movie.
For a mainstream picture, The Switch at least makes an attempt to recognize the often-messy reality of people's lives. Aniston, the single mom, suffers the least of any character in the movie: Capable and efficient, she's perfectly equipped to handle any challenge her oddball son dishes out, including his worries about having numerous unlikely ailments, such as Parkinson's. (The kid, Sebastian, is played by Thomas Robinson, who never steps over the line into horrid cuteness.) Aniston has always struck me as a blandly appealing performer: I can never bring myself to strongly like or dislike her, though I have found myself admiring her willingness to vest her characters with a slight shrewishness -- as cute as she is, she never settles for being just plain adorable.
But Aniston's performance in The Switch suggests something else about her: She has less screen time than Bateman does, and she doesn't hog what she's got -- she leaves lots of breathing space for her co-star, as if she realizes, subconsciously or otherwise, that this really is his time to shine. Bateman is terrific even in the movie's most throwaway moments. All of his scenes with his boss, played by a marvelously zonked-out Jeff Goldblum, are great fun to watch. Their rhythms slither and slide warily around each other; the result is a kind of prickly, strictly platonic flirtatiousness.
On the other hand, Bateman's scenes with Aniston are just on the safe side of crazy-making. Crossing the street one day, he encounters a rambling, obviously crazy New York street-person who sizes him up and deems him "A little man-boy -- a beady-eyed little man-boy." Relaying the episode to Kassie later, he worries that the guy really has him pegged, thanks to some kind of "Tourettes-style truth serum." His anxiety seems to set the very tips of his spiky hair aquiver.
Bateman is wonderful in his scenes with Robinson. Sebastian is a sober child who manifests many of his dad's personality quirks and physical tics, like crossing his legs in a certain way or worrying that he has "hypochondria." Bateman is never upstaged by Robinson, nor does he overwhelm the kid. And he allows, rather honestly, that this child is perhaps more exasperating than he is charming. As your grandmother -- or someone's grandmother -- used to say, The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. In The Switch, Bateman plays a not-so-romantic lead who sometimes makes you want to shake him. And still, he's never been so appealing.