..but for a very simple reason. This movie is another late-middle-aged fantasy from writer-director Nancy Meyers. Like her earlier Something’s Gotta Give this focuses on a love triangle in which two men pine for the same fifty-to-sixtyish woman, but this time the formula doesn’t work. (Another Meyers fantasy is that her characters’ only problems are romantic. They lead Hollywood-style lives in impossibly beautiful homes and never have a financial care in the world, let alone a mortgage payment.) Alex Baldwin plays the charming ex-husband and cad Jake, who left his wife, Jane (Meryl Streep), for a hotter, younger woman, Agness (Lake Bell), who is now his wife. But when Agness can’t come to his son’s college graduation, Jake and Jane get stuck together at a Manhattan hotel and Jane finds herself being the other woman. Okay, sure, we all imagine that we might end up in the sack again with our ex husbands, and undoubtedly our children fantasize that their parents might get back together. But as Baldwin’s attempted seduction of his ex succeeds, it fails to convince the audience. Not that it isn’t fun to watch. Baldwin is laugh-out-loud hilarious. But we never quite believe that he could fall back in love with Streep’s character, Jane. She’s too set in her ways. She’s got a garden to tend to, she doesn’t wear makeup, she dismisses afternoon sex, she’s hard on him over the way he eats and walks. During their romps, she answers her cell phone whenever it rings. Time and again, she proves herself to be exactly the kind of woman men leave. So why would Jake want her back? In Something’s Gotta Give, the Diane Keaton character removed the big woolen white turtlenecks she always hid in to open up and be more pleasing to both Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves. But Streep doesn’t want to change a thing. Then there’s Adam (Steve Martin), the architect designing the huge addition she’s putting on her already-palatial Santa Barbara house. Martin is the safe, likable beau who goes from polite nerd to wild and crazy guy when he has a hit of marijuana (this is one of the funniest scenes.) Yet while you laugh, you can never completely immerse yourself in this movie, because you never stop thinking of it as a far-fetched wish-fulfillment fantasy – one you can’t believe, no matter how reassuring it might be if you could. Two tiaras
