It's Complicated

Editorial

It’s not complicated at all, really. In fact it’s right there on the post-coital poster: Meryl Streep pleasantly confused; Alec Baldwin smugly pleased with himself. Verily, it’s hard to think of a recent movie more dependent on its casting and chemistry than this one. As confirmation, we get a measure of how it might have been otherwise in the first 20 minutes. It ain’t pretty.

After a brief, tense introduction of these exes at a party, we’re stranded with Meryl and her simpering, ever-smiling kids, and her Greek chorus of you-go-girl gal pals. Ennui descends, followed closely by a feeling of entrapment that has your eyes involuntarily drawing a bead on the exit signs.

Things aren’t helped by Nancy Meyers’ uninspired direction, or her gormless close-up edits, or an insufferably banal score seemingly lifted from some mid-1960s sex comedy. But then — whammo — out come the big guns, Baldwin and Streep, propping up a bar, doing what they do, before the drunken moment that leads to that poster image.

In those few moments, It's Complicated comes alive — funny, touching and real, or as real as this sort of whitebread romantic-comedy ever gets.

It's Complicated never looks back after that moment, and it’s as if the energy of the leads drags everyone and everything else up with it. Streep is breathy and uncertain and it’s entertaining to watch her character get her groove back. While he starts off very Jack-like (you half expect him to call Streep “Lemon”), it’s good to see Baldwin move in the other direction, from glib and assured to searching.

Steve Martin is slow off the mark but soon gets up to comic speed as the new suitor on the scene and, while the kids remain little more than window-dressing, John Krasinski, after being stranded in the first act, gets good mileage out of his role as son-in-law to be who knows what’s going on between his fiancée’s parents.

There’s some amusingly loose stuff between Streep and Baldwin — a vagina-cupping, a semen joke — that is simply mid-life raunch-com, but also right as repartee between two adults who’ve known each other for decades. Meanwhile, Streep and Martin even make the tired old-people-get-stoned bit actually funny.

It’s the leads’ ease in their saggy skins that sets the film apart. And whatever her other sins, Meyers is smart enough not to draw out idiot plot contrivances; it’s refreshing that characters, faced with awkward situations, simply lay themselves on the line — and survive the consequences.

Michael Adams