There are two good things about writer-director Nancy Meyers’s rom-com.
The first is that it dares to be exclusively about middle-age emotional dilemmas, hardly ever examined on the screen.
The second, and most important, is that it includes two attractively nuanced performances from Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin.
Otherwise it’s a slice of pure Hollywood hokum overstaying its welcome by at least 15 long minutes.
Streep is a divorced woman who owns a Santa Barbara bakery and restaurant, has three grown-up children and hasn’t had a relationship for almost a decade.
Her friends worry about her and so does her former husband (Baldwin), now decidedly plump and married to a much younger woman (Lake Bell) but delighted to meet up with her again at one of those awful rah-rah American graduation ceremonies.
So delighted is he, in fact, that he falls in love with her all over again and sets about seducing her. But there’s another who is after her — an architect (Steve Martin) who is about to build her an even more luxurious house than she has already.
These are rich middle-class Americans who live better than 99.9 per cent of the world’s population, go about in smart cars and complain about their huge kitchens.
It is difficult to be overly sympathetic as the poor woman tries to make up her mind between her two lovers. Perhaps she should have bought a dog, as one of her children says.
But Streep, acting as naturally as she knows how, is consistently good to watch, and portly Mr Baldwin exhibits a full measure of his rather egregious charm even when rolling about half naked in bed like a plucked turkey ready for the oven.
No one else in the film, especially the kids and Lake Bell, gets much of a look-in.
Instead we get Streep and Baldwin making the most of their complicated situation, with Martin following along behind in a less-than-grateful part.
Meyers takes the easy way out every time. But at least her stars are decent value, even if the film is not.
It's Complicated
Cert: 15
