romantic movies review: It's Complicated

It's Complicated Review

It's Complicated Overview

Two-time Academy Award® winner Meryl Streep, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin star in this hilarious look at marriage, divorce and everything in between. Jane (Streep) has three grown kids, a thriving Santa Barbara bakery and an amicable relationship with her ex-husband, Jake (Baldwin). Now, a decade after their divorce, an innocent dinner between Jane and Jake turns into the unimaginable - an affair. Caught in the middle of their rekindled romance are Jake’s young wife and Adam (Martin), a recently divorced architect who starts to fall for Jane. Could love be sweeter the second time around? It’s… complicated! From writer/director Nancy Meyers comes the comedy that critics call "laugh-out-loud funny" (Rex Reed, The New York Observer).

It's Complicated Specifications

It's delightful to see Meryl Streep come into her own as a romantic comedian in her later career years--after all the accolades, the Oscars, the serious-as-marble dramatic roles. Streep is in fact a true cutup, as she has demonstrated in films like Mamma Mia and Julie & Julia--and she gets the guy. So if Nancy Meyers's It's Complicated is perhaps a bit facile in the plot department, it's saved by a splendid romp of a performance by Streep (as Jane), along with her two leading men, Alec Baldwin (Jane's ex-husband, Jake) and Steve Martin (her supposed boyfriend, Adam). Meyers, as she did in Something's Gotta Give and Baby Boom, turns notions of over-the-hilldom--at least for women--on their ear. Streep's Jane is a contented, affluent divorcée with excellent taste in furnishings, happily about to preside over an empty nest and feeling just fine about it. Who should bump into, and ruin, this perfect solitude but Jane's ex, Jake, played to a pompous (and hilarious) fare-thee-well by Baldwin. "Turns out I'm a bit of a slut," chirps the sexually awakened Jane. The beauty of It's Complicated is that it really isn't all that complicated--its chemistry depends on the wonderful actors (including the supporting cast of John Krasinski, Lake Bell, Mary Kay Place, and Rita Wilson) and the oft-forgotten reality that people over 25 can have great sex, and fall head over heels. --A.T. Hurley

Stills from It's Complicated (Click for larger image)