For me, there have always been two sure things at the movies. If the movie stars Meryl Streep, I will like it. And if the movie stars Steve Martin, I’m in for good time. Well, that’s all very good news for It’s Complicated. It stars both. Too bad it took both to overcome the movie’s weaknesses.
Streep plays Jane, Martin plays Adam, and, rounding out the cast, the always reliable Alec Baldwin plays Jake in a comedic turn. As the simplicity of the character names suggests, it is a romantic triangle broadly played for all the angles as Jane has an affair with her now remarried ex-husband Jake and begins a relationship with Adam, her divorced architect.
Jake has remarried to a much younger woman and they have a child together. The kid is more than Jake bargained for when he captured his trophy bride and she has a really scary tattoo on her back and “high maintenance” written all over her forehead. His eyes are primed for straying, again, and back to his “old” wife Jane they go.
Jane, feeling like she hasn’t been “getting any” for far too long and encouraged by her circle of friends (women in movies so often have a circle of friends who sit around in a circle and talk dirty) is ready for an affair. It’s inevitable that Jake and Jane will come together and re-mingle. The complications are: What will their grown kids think? And how will she juggle this affair and Adam?
I found the movie entertaining and diverting, mostly due, as I already confessed, to the enormous appeal of Streep and Martin, not to mention the perfect pleasure of seeing them on screen together. I did have to overlook a lot of things that just didn’t ring true though.
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