🎬🍿MOVIE REVIEW: IT'S COMPLICATED
As a post-menopausal woman who's often in need of a bathroom, it's nice to retreat into a Nancy Meyers movie, a world built for, filled with, STARRING! post-menopausal women! Older gals who need to pee a little more often than our younger counterparts do because we are post-menopausal. Women who no longer ovulate and whose ovaries, once the size of walnuts when we were in our sexual "prime," are now the size of peas. Wizened peas! Yet, in Myers's movies we older broads always win! We always look good. We always get the guy. We always get that second career, and it's more emotionally/financially satisfying than the first! We always live in beautifully appointed homes (often seaside), and we always dine in trendy but excellent restaurants. Soft, lightly scented lavender oil graces our temples... or you may find the lavender in the honey lavender ice cream we just made and are now eating right here in our gorgeous kitchens with a gorgeous man - at midnight! With the candlelight creating a romantic ambience, we forget about all the calories we're packing on. We canoodle and he whispers into our ears, "Mmmm. You smell like butter!"
We enjoy our glass of wine paired with the exquisite dinner we have just cooked from scratch in our huge, state-of-the art kitchens... dinner for our gal pals who are part Greek chorus part wise sisters. At the dining room table (beautiful table runner, white taper candles lit, fresh flowers in little glass globes) we diss our ex-beaus, our ex-husbands, both dead and alive. And we laugh and laugh because we have Feng Shui-ed are old lives into graceful and gracious new ones - without our men ... while the boys have ... failed. Oh, and the chocolate croissants we bake! The goddess jewelry we wear to cover our wrinkly decolletage! The flowing silk blouses we are swaddled in to hide our thick middles! Our gorgeous earth-tone sofas, our wicker plant stands, the soft lighting, the newest, shiniest BEST kitchen appliances! The farmers markets! The apple tarts we bake for our friends with the apples we bought at the farmers market! These elements are all in my favorite Nancy Myers movies, every older woman's wet dream ...
So, now I am re-watching Myers's IT'S COMPLICATED and melting into the tasteful, upper-middle-class scenery and the Baby Boomer soundtrack. It's a 2010 rom-com starring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin ...light and frothy...fun...and touching the Better Homes and Gardens soul of every 55+-year-old lady in America.
Nancy Myers is a bonafide Hollywood hit maker so she got all the Baby Boomer icons to star in her films: Dianne Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Goldie Hawn, Martin Short, Steve Martin. Myers is the screen writer and director for her films - a true "auteur" ... behind PRIVATE BENJAMIN and BABY BOOM and her remake (parts 1 and 2) of the Spencer Tracy/Elizabeth Taylor classic FATHER OF THE BRIDE. My favorite two Myers movies are IT'S COMPLICATED and SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE. I go back and forth between these two films every few years - the perfect antidotes to American society which stops "seeing" us older women once we're past 55. Of course, now we're wiser than we were 30 years ago. We have more self confidence than our younger selves, and we aren't lonely even though we are often alone. We love our lives: our dogs, our work, our butter and lavender honey ice cream. And the men in our lives.
This movie (It's Complicated) begins at a catered anniversary party, beach side, with the ocean waves crashing on the sand just yards away from the beautifully coiffed older Baby Boomers sipping their champagne. Jane (Meryl Streep) and Jake (Alec Baldwin) have been divorced for 10 years. They're at this party, their champagne flutes half filled with the bubbly and they're reminiscing about a past trip to Spain that took together with the hosts for their 15th wedding anniversaries. Jake is beaming at Jane, being so charming. Jane is enjoying her handsome ex-husband's attentive gaze and sweet sense of humor. But down the walk way, straight to her new hubby Jake, strolls the young and lovely Agnes - the new wife/ other woman. Agnes does not need to wear goddess jewelry or flowing blouses...she needs no camouflage. She's a slender reed basically wearing a bikini with a see-thru sarong. She has no flab, no tummy, and her belly button has a life of its own. Agnes is about 30 years old...seeing her long black hair and Sports Illustrated body, Jane gets flustered and leaves the party. Jake looks at her longingly as she shuts the gate to this private stretch of sand - while his arms are around his young wife's tiny, firm waist.
Jane drives home; her youngest girl is off to college. After seeing off the baby of the family, Jane grows pensive. Looking outside her kitchen window next to that stunning butcher block island (she's a pastry chef who owns a huge, successful bakery/coffee shop in town) Jane sighs but then shakes herself "awake"! Tomorrow is a new day!! And what a day! She jogs in her beautiful Southern California neighborhood, she goes to her gorgeous bake shop, oversees her amazing staff, serves up her beautiful pastries and muffins to scores of appreciative, practically loving, customers. Adam (Steve Martin) is the local architect waiting for her at her bake shoppe's breakfast counter with the architectural drawings for Jane's NEW KITCHEN AND EXPANDED BEDROOM! The bathroom is being remodeled too!! with Jane specifically asking Adam for only one sink in her renovated bathroom because "I have two sinks now and sometimes the other sink makes me feel sad." We cannot wait to see the finished additions and redos! Myers's films are as much Better Homes and Gardens as entertainment!
Still, despite all the fancy gadgets and spices and three great kids all grown up and wildly successful bake shop where she can create the best pastries in town (Jane was an apprentice baker in Paris for a year after college !), our heroine feels old and alone.
In New York City for her son Luke's college graduation, Jane's path crosses with ex-husband Jake's. He's in town, alone too, staying in the same hotel as Jane, here for their son's graduation. At the hotel bar, a big bottle of wine uncorked Jane and Jake drink and flirt and dance and later that night have drunken sex in Jane's hotel room. The sex is loose and easy. Jake says, ALL OUR EARLY LIFE GOALS HAVE BEEN MET, Janey! (career, law school, kids grown and out of the house). Sure, I'm married, but now is the PERFECT time for us to get it on and do it right this time! "The sex was smokin' hot!" Jake says, robust and turned on. Jane feels guilty but silly infatuated, so they begin their affair.
I adore Meryl Streep - such a great actress! - but Alec Baldwin is the one who really shines here as the absentee hubby and dad now realizing what he had and lost and wanting to make it right now, a decade later. Baldwin is a big gorgeous 58-year-old pappa bear - he's sexy, goofy and real in this film. You see his desire for Jane, you see the love, too. The tender way he looks at Jane, the joking around, the fun. But so often Streep plays Janey as dismissive, guilt-ridden ... just a party pooper. You feel Baldwin is giving 80% and Streep is not really seeing that it IS complicated.
Still, this movie is entertaining. But not too deep. Gena Rowlands, another great actress on par with Streep, died a few days ago. I saw her and loved her with Peter Falk in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE. Had the videocassette for many years. Watched it with wonder over and over again. Too deep. Makes you realize that all the STUFF in Myers movie pales in comparison to this phenomenal love between a working class man and his woman. Watch the Gena Rowlands film.