Movie Review: It's Complicated
The Players:
Writer/Director: Nancy Meyers
Starring: Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin, John Krasinski
Music: Heitor Pereira and Hans Zimmer
Cinematography by: John Toll
Executive Producers: Suzanne McNeill Farwell and Ilona Herzberg
Theatrical Release:Dec 25, 2009 Wide
Nancy Meyers' It's Complicated is the kind of movie I would happily have sent my late mother to see: a little bawdy (but not too bawdy), a little naughty (but not too), funny enough, with lots of moments that would make her nod and say, "That's so true." The kind of movie she would have walked out of saying, "That was soooo cute."
In other words, It's Complicated isn't really complicated at all. It's exactly the kind of middlebrow entertainment that attracts people who no longer go to movies - because it seems like the kind of movie they no longer make.
In fact, they do. It's just that most of them star someone like Matthew McConaughey or Kate Hudson or someone else the 45+ audience has no interest in seeing. Meyers' stroke of brilliance is in writing that kind of film and then casting it with "prestige" actors like Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin (with John Krasinski of The Office thrown in - you know, for the "young" people).
While it has its funny moments, It's Complicated is as overlong and slack as the rest of Meyers' oeuvre. Meyers can't seem to write a comedy that doesn't appear to draw generously from her own life - and which doesn't include the movie equivalent of either an encounter group or a therapy session (or both). And most of her films seem to trade on that old comedy dictum: There's no fool like an old fool.
