BEFORE: Meryl Streep carries over again, and I think I've now seen every major Streep picture, except for "Mamma Mia". Sure, there are some minor ones I probably skipped, but just like with Robin Williams and Robert Redford, I don't have to go for 100% completion - I'm free to determine where to draw the line.
In any other year, I would have counted this as a romance, but since I devised this chain when there was still a chance I could end this project in 2015, I worked it in here, and I'm still following that plan.
THE PLOT: A career driven professional from Manhattan is wooed by a young painter, who also happens to be the son of her psychoanalyst.
AFTER: OK, forget what I said about this week being about industries I don't understand. This week is about ethics. A tough word to get a grip on sometimes, but we dealt with the ethics of selling oil and merging oil companies (umm, I think...) in "Syriana", the ethics of looting a country's fine art during wartime, the ethics of selling insurance policies and never paying claims, and the ethics of trying go get out of a TV show contract by casting a conjoined twin as a co-star. Yeah, OK, the ethics of the fashion industry, but that's a bit of a stretch.
The ethical thing for an analyst to do, if she finds out her patient is dating her son, would be to help that patient find a new analyst. I don't think I'm divulging any spoilers by revealing this bit of the plot, because it's in the tagline, geez, it's on the freaking poster. Anyway, that's not what Streep's analyst character does - because if she did, the movie would be over an hour too early. Instead she keeps treating the patient, intently curious about what sort of boyfriend her son is. Curiousity mixed with cringing that is, because she learns some intimate details that make her cringe, but still she continues.
The story had to cheat a little bit to allow this awkward situation to develop in the first place - the audience is meant to figure it out well in advance of the characters themselves. To do this, a number of cheats are introduced, namely that the mother and son have different last names (well, she is a professional woman) and they don't live in the same apartment (for some reason, he rooms with his grandparents) and the patient also fudges the age of her boyfriend when she talks to her therapist. OK, sure, maybe she's a bit embarrassed about dating a younger man, but that's three unlikely things that need to occur to bring about this confusion from the overlapping of characters.
I almost marked this as a follow-up to another romance film I watched a couple years ago that pulled off nearly the same cheat, but the difference is that I felt that film succeeded in maintaining the element of surprise, even from the audience, for much longer. So if I mention the connection between this film and that one, that's a spoiler, and I don't want to ruin that other film for anyone. But I gave that film a higher rating, and felt that it was perhaps a bit too clever in its contrivance.
This film commits a few more movie sins, also - like having a terribly underdeveloped best friend character. For some reason, after dating a woman once, he appears on their doorstep to hit them in the face with a cream pie - why? Is this because the women won't give him a second date, or does he do this to ensure there will be no second date? Does he have some weird fetish, or does he just hate women, and if so, why does he continue to date them? This is the guy who should be on the analyst's couch, but his actions are never explained. They're despicable, but at least slightly interesting.
But it's really about an older divorced woman in a relationship with a younger man. Can they make it work despite the age gap and the difference in their religions? He's also a struggling artist, and she's..., huh, I'm not really sure what her job was, but it's something in the fashion industry. (She works for a photographer? I guess it's not important.) Are they made for each other despite their differences, or is their relationship doomed to fail? I guess it depends on who you ask, but they were a little bit on-again, off-again, so it seems like the film was trying to have it both ways, and ultimately you've got to pick one. Whichever result you're rooting for here, there's a 50% chance of being disappointed.
Also starring Uma Thurman (last seen in "Tape"), Bryan Greenberg (last seen in "Friends With Benefits"), John Rothman (also carrying over from "The Devil Wears Prada"), Jon Abrahams (last seen in "Non-Stop"), Zak Orth (last seen in "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger"), Jerry Adler (last seen in "The Angriest Man in Brooklyn"), Doris Belack, Annie Parisse, with cameos from Aubrey Dollar, David Costabile (last seen in "Cradle Will Rock"), Will McCormack.
RATING: 4 out of 10 quail eggs
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