It’s Complicated
Directed by Nancy Meyers
Runtime: 118 min.
No film school teaches about the Phantom Hollywood genre: mainstream movies that sneakily validate the personal foibles of film industry professionals. These movies—usually about divorce, infidelity, broken homes, power-and-sex addictions—are contrived to look like they’re about average folk. Nancy Meyers’ It’s Complicated is the latest. Its story of a middle-aged divorced couple—Jane and Jake—who get back together despite other new attachments, bears little connection to actual human behavior or recognizable lifestyles. Each “adorable” yet unreal scene is more offensive than the last.
Art is supposed to be personal expression, but Phantom Hollywood movies deliberately avoid self-examination. They’re about self-pity and their plots navigate self-absolution for mistakes made through permissiveness, privilege and sheer vanity. It’s Complicated is textbook Phantom Hollywood, starting with its establishing shot of sun-baked gabled roofs and manicured lawns—the middle-class world that once was the setting for boulevard comedies written for the theater to entertain the bourgeoisie. Recently this Los Angeles luxe has become the default milieu for fantasies about Hollywood’s nouveau riche (see any Judd Apatow-directed film).
Successful professionals Jane and Jake (Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin) never really got over their divorce. Public occasions with their adult kids draw them together despite Jane’s flirtation with an architect (Steve Martin) and Jake’s remarriage to a younger woman. Typical of Phantom Hollywood, Meyers writes and directs screwball-comedy situations that feel inspired by her class’s guilt more than the classical unities of a marital farce like Leo McCarey’s 1937 The Awful Truth . The title It’s Complicated is a convenient, 21st-century way of repeating McCarey’s brand name without admitting that Meyers lazily avoids the awful truth about the embarrassments of poor romantic choices and a perpetually infantilized affluent culture. Jane’s plastic surgery options, like Jake’s fertility clinic visits, become comic routines making light of their private desperation and casual extravagance. When Jake calls himself a cliché, he should stipulate “Hollywood cliché.”
Meyers’ filmmaking is not improving; her movies are drawn out, repetitive and lack precision and complexity. It’s Complicated imitates James L. Brooks’ social specifics yet it’s facile like Nora Ephron. Meyers couldn’t be more false if she was trying to overlook complexity, difficulty and toil. Her slick, easily managed complications are no more credible than the myth of domestic happiness, which promiscuous Hollywood refuses to endorse. It’s Complicated endorses analysis. Jane’s therapist session basically asks for permission (“It can’t hurt”)—the Hollywood alternative to prayer or religious counsel. No spiritual quest occurs in Phantom Hollywood movies, that’s why its characters are vapid.
Call these leads Actressy (Streep), Creepy (Martin) and Gross (Baldwin). Streep’s best moment is when Jane smokes weed and looks at herself in the mirror, but the horrendous scene where she explicates her liaison to her grown-up children as if they were children is pure Phantom Hollywood hokum. Martin’s scarily effete suitor poorly represents self-reliance, while Baldwin’s co-dependence is overly sentimental. Jake, who wants to be fed and mothered, is the closest Meyers comes to originality. Aging into a Charles Durning bear, Baldwin gives his most fully dimensional performance. But Jake’s soft masculinity repeats Jack Nicholson’s great characterization in Meyers’ Something’s Gotta Give , while Streep can’t match Diane Keaton’s great performance in that film. Streep’s mature womanliness has distinguished the best streak of her career (Manchurian Candidate , Prairie Home Companion , Lions for Lambs , Dark Matter ), but Phantom Hollywood movies don’t respect subtlety or realism. So instead of showing how Hollywood sees itself, Streep exposes how Hollywood shamelessly over-emotes.
