It's Complicated: Off with ageism in romantic comedies

Director/writer Nancy Meyers once again puts an aging couple at the center of her romantic comedy, 'It's Comlplicated.' Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin play a divorced couple who fall in love and lust after 10 years


If nothing else, kudos to writer/director Nancy Meyers for redefining a genre that was otherwise at the heart of ageism: the romantic comedy. She’s the one who coupled Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt in What Women Want and given a chance at newfound romance for Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson in Something’s Gotta Give.

In It’s Complicated, Meyers pairs Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, and adds Steve Martin to the love triangle, making the young characters in the movie nearly irrelevant. Streep plays Jane, a divorced mother of three young adults. Having overcome her divorce 10 years ago and not too easily, she’s in a good place with children grown into pleasant personalities, reliable girlfriends at hand, and her own charming bakery becoming the ideal job for self-fulfillment.

Apparently, there’s something missing in her life when a New York trip for her son’s graduation turns into the blossoming of an affair with her ex-husband Adam (Baldwin). The sex in a New York hotel stirs something in both of them as the two embark on a sexual odyssey, defined by something unresolved for both of them. Adam is married to young, hot, but boring Agness (Lake Bell), while Jane is courted by her architect, the suave Jake (Martin).

Both Streep and Baldwin play characters they’re good at (although it would be unfair to say Streep is not good in any role). She plays the eye-drooping strong women who’s able to balance everything in her life, love, lust, zest for life, children, friends, job and even an ambitious refurbishment of her house. He plays the lusty, passionate lover with the Mediterranean charm, a man who’s not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve.



Not much for supporting characters

The scenes of the two are charming, funny, often romantic and at times sexy. It’s when other characters enter the scene that the movie takes the worst of romantic comedies. The three children of the couple are annoyingly pleasant. In real life, they would be children to die for, but in a movie they become boring with no function of advancing the plot. When one of them proclaims she’s “damaged” from her parents’ divorce, it becomes hardly convincing when the family members constantly hug each other and declare their love as often as they can.

Jane’s girlfriends (including Tom Hanks’s wife, Rita Wilson, and Ali Wentworth) and their rants on sex become bad parodies of Sex and the City. Steve Martin, with his dove-eyed sensitive architect smitten with Jane, and John Krasinski’s (Jim from The Office: US) prospective son-in-law are the only supporting characters that breath life into the movie.

Director and writer Meyers doesn’t bring anything new with It’s Complicated, sometimes even becoming too predictable and repetitive. But with Merly Streep and Alec Baldwin as the aging couple in lust, the movie becomes the ideal charmer for cold nights.

Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News on 29 Jan. 10