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    'It's Complicated': What's Not to Love?

    Posted:
    12/29/09
    Filed Under:Woman Up
    I loved it, it's that simple. It's fun, it's entertaining, it doesn't pretend to be reality. Meryl is perfect, as usual, and Alec Baldwin, who rarely makes me love him, won me over.

    I love the setting, presumably Santa Barbara, and, yes, this is a movie about wealthy people in their pastoral grounds engaged in relatively trivial pursuits. It's not to be confused with a movie of serious social pretensions. I like it that a formidable 60-year-old woman who has not endured shots of Botox or other cosmetic re-arrangements, who is stylish and in trim shape, can still get it on.

    True, as Melinda pointed out, why are only actresses like Streep and Diane Keaton playing those rare roles? -- sexy older woman catches man. Well, Keaton's goofy act lends itself to the type of comedy that the creator and director of "It's Complicated," Nancy Meyers, concocts like so many soufflés. Keaton is adorable, and Streep can do anything brilliantly. You believe that middle-aged men would fall for them. Besides, the men they catch are not your standard romantic leading men.

    Jack Nicholson, who starred with Keaton in 2003's "Something's Gotta Give," is hardly in his prime, hardly the picture of buffed machismo. He's got a paunch and a bad ticker. Alec Baldwin, playing Streep's ex, is grossly hairy and has a doughy girth. Heck, he's fat. So even if Keaton and Streep are playing sexy women in their late 50s, look at the men they are landing in bed. Priceless they are not. It's not Sean Connery (age 70ish) bedding Catherine Zeta-Jones (in her 30s)!
    Melinda suggests that Streep is being over-used. Maybe. I don't think so, but I can see that given her output this year alone, Streep could sit out a dance or two. There are others who could pull off the sexy older woman comedy. Helen Mirren and Susan Sarandon come to mind. Let's hope that Meyers and her fellow female-comedy-centered director Nora Ephron spread the wealth.

    Beneath the glossy exterior, and its raucous lightness of being, the film does make a couple of serious points about divorce and age. When Streep and Baldwin's adult children discover that their parents are having an affair after having been divorced for ten years, they cry. Though conventional thinking might suggest that the children should be happy to see their parents reunited and in love, it is not so. I understood. I lived that scene with my own parents, and I cried at the time. But unlike Streep and Baldwin, my parents did get re-married. They divorced, a second time, and we had to live the nightmare all over again. Sorry, that was serious, and "It's Complicated" is fun, tears and all. Exit laughing!
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    Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

    Luisita Lopez Torregrosa, a former editor at The New York Times and magazine writer, is an adjunct professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism... more

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