Filmikaze!

By: Nancy Meyers (director, writer)

Starring: Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin, John Krasinski

When attending their son’s college graduation, a couple reignite the spark in their relationship…but the complicated fact is they’re divorced and he’s remarried.

I really wish I could like Nancy Meyers. There aren’t that many successful female directors in the film industry, and I’d like to at least be able to show a little solidarity on that front. However, I find her films so tremendously lackluster, even if they weren’t quietly subverting the girl power they claim to support, I’d still think they were a waste of my time.

I think it’s great that someone is making movies about middle-aged women as fully-formed human beings and not simply mothers and grandmothers. I just wish Meyers would find a way to do it that didn’t include the entire movie hinging on defining yourself through a man. I thought for a little while that It’s Complicated was actually going to shrug off the Meyer syndrome, but no. It’s still all about men.

Beyond that, there was something cloyingly insipid about the central family in this film. Meryl Streep was the best of the lot, but she still managed to annoy me, and I wanted to punch every once of her grown yet still wholly spoiled children in the face. Alec Baldwin was the worst, his character nothing but skeevy the whole way through. Had Steve Martin not been there to be his effortlessly charming self and balance it all out, I would have felt the need for a shower after, I’m sure. John Krasinski tried to help Martin out, but he was so relatable and endearing that in the end I just wondered how in the hell he married into that pretentious mess in the first place.