BEFORE: Toni Collette carries over from "About a Boy", and I'm rewarded again for re-organizing my February chain, because this puts two films about single parents on the dating scene right next to each other.
THE PLOT: A divorced woman who decides to pursue the man she's interested in learns he's her new friend's ex-husband.
AFTER: If you think about it, families with divorced parents haven't been around all that long, at least not without the stigma that they used to come with. Organized religion had a stranglehold for the populace for so long, and brainwashed people into thinking that divorce was unholy, it's really just in the last 4 or 5 decades that spouses haven't felt any pressure to stay in a marriage that wasn't working. Remember when if someone was divorced, you wondered what went wrong? Of course, now I think the pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction, because these days people get divorced just because they weren't "feeling into it" any more.
Look back on the great sitcom families, like the Brady Bunch. We presume that Mike's first wife and Carol's first husband were deceased, because in the 1960's you couldn't do a story about divorced parents and have them remain sympathetic characters. Plus the audience would always be wondering why Marcia and Jan never visited their biological father. Then in the 1970's there was a flood of single-parent shows, like "Alice" and "One Day at a Time", where the fathers were noticeably absent, but rarely discussed. Even assuming that TV's a decade or so behind the times, it still means that the rules for dealing with all this, in real-life as well as entertainment scenarios, are still relatively new.
The lead character here finds herself in a new situation, and is unsure what the proper rules are - should she inform her new friend/client that she's recently started dating her ex-husband? Should she tell her new boyfriend that she happens to know his ex-wife through another channel? What are the implications if she remains silent, and uses one relationship to gather information about what to expect from the other? Yes, it almost seems like it stems from a sitcom-ish misunderstanding, but at least there are consequences stemming from her actions.
At the same time, she's getting ready to send her daughter off to college, and that means working together with her own ex-husband to make sure her daughter is prepared, while her new boyfriend goes through the same process with his own daughter. Plus her daughter's best friend is hanging around, seemingly in need of a mother figure of her own. So it's a complicated set of circumstances with a lot of petty jealousies to go around. But sometimes life is complicated like that, I guess.
But what the film gets right is that people aren't perfect, so naturally neither are most relationships. There are just ones with problems you can handle, and ones with problems that you can't. And sometimes those little idiosyncrasies that you find cute at the beginning of a relationship become annoying later on. That's just the way it goes.
Also starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus (last heard in "Planes"), James Gandolfini (last seen in "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone"), Catherine Keener (last seen in "Captain Phillips"), Ben Falcone (last seen in "Identity Thief"), Tracey Fairaway, Tavi Gevinson, Eve Hewson, Toby Huss.
RATING: 5 out of 10 mimosas
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