Something’s Gotta Give
Directed by Nancy Meyers

The spectacle of Diane Keaton as a radiant 57-year-old falling in love with Jack Nicholson as a still-randy 66-year-old is enough to redeem Something’s Gotta Give. It’s an example of movie-star power at the brightest wattage in dim circumstances. Yet Keaton and Nicholson do more than coast on personality. They commit themselves to illuminating common romantic frustration–the essence of good screwball comedy–and do so in even more complicated ways than George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Intolerable Cruelty. Keaton and Nicholson carry the authority of age. Their sense of worldly, still-working-it-out experience is more trenchant than anything we actually hear or see in Nancy Meyers’ formulaic screenplay and direction.

It’s an interesting lesson in the star/audience symbiosis. The Coen Brothers used their stars’ seductive good looks and the aura of riches to critique a culture of heedless pleasure and morally bankrupt affluence. But Something’s Gotta Give, set in a super-luxurious Hamptons beach house (then Manhattan’s Upper East Side, then Paris), trumpets its famous stars and goes for luxe. Not at all subversive, this conventionally sentimental film only pretends to ignore youth-baiting box-office trends; its unexpected significance comes from Meyers taking her movie stars at face value–human value.

Keaton’s playwright Erica Barry and Nicholson’s record mogul Harry Sanborn are extensions of other roles they’ve played before, elaborating each performer’s personality quirks. But their emphasis on now revealing specific middle-aged anxieties feels like a brave culmination. Nicholson’s roué in The Witches of Eastwick, Terms of Endearment and the eccentric Man Trouble had no real female foils; the characterizations were completely phallocentric–proof that Hollywood, deep down, is not much interested in exploring women’s feelings. The emotional cripple Nicholson played in As Good as It Gets obviously informed Meyers’ concept of Harry, but Nicholson plays it entirely free of his familiar snarkiness. Despite the heart attack that puts Harry in Erica’s care (a Hamptons doctor played by Keanu Reeves orders him to convalesce at Erica’s home near the hospital), this is essentially a robust, chin-up characterization. Nicholson has rarely acted eye-to-eye, champion-to-champion with a woman. His rapport with Keaton is on a different plane than their antagonistic scenes in Reds. At times, his full emotionalism–from Harry’s frustration to ardor to agonizing patience–is as Everyman-vivid as Jackie Gleason in tv’s The Honeymooners.

Disclosing Harry’s need for a love partner seems like Nicholson’s personal revelation beyond Meyers’ facile sitcom set-up. It comes across as credibly and unabashedly as Nicholson’s paunch (although Meyers crudely focuses on Harry’s exposed backside when wearing a hospital gown). Because of Meyers’ blatancy, you have to watch for physical and emotional subtleties to enjoy this movie. Nicholson and Keaton draw troubled romanticism out of themselves. Their wrinkled faces, weathered bodies and alert eyes offer an alternate narrative to Meyers’ simplistic story and specious happy ending. (She loads the film with May-December flirtations involving Reeves and Amanda Peet. Meyers ignores that even Keaton and Nicholson are at least a generation apart, yet still tries to get laughs out of a mature couple’s floundering passions.) Maybe Meyers deserves some credit for going along with her stars’ idiosyncrasies, but I want to distinguish between the richness of the way Harry and Erica lie together in bed on a rainy afternoon and the perfunctory structure of their meet-cute, fuck-nice, fall-apart and get-back-together. It’s Nicholson and Keaton’s acting that’s amazing. Not the filmmaking.

Meyers shows an insulting tendency toward cliche. Her pacing has certainly improved since making the 2000 Mel Gibson film What Women Want, but she clearly belongs to the same obnoxious class of Hollywood professionals as Nora Ephron, Billy Crystal and Rob Reiner, who have ruined the screwball comedy genre through plots that are a rickety blend of Neil Simon gags, Woody Allen pathos and tv banality. Such ghastly films as When Harry Met Sally, The Story of Us, You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle and Forget Paris were devoid of wit but sought justification in middle-class self-indulgence. They set a rotten contemporary standard; no wonder Intolerable Cruelty went past audiences’ sensitivities and over their heads.

With cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, Meyers buys a pricey visual style of coordinated blue, beige and pearl-white. It’s an offensively snotty look, like Woody Allen tried for in September and a refinement of What Women Want’s slickness. She sucks up to materialism, misconstruing the swankiness of 1930s screwballs as a confirmation of peoples’ shallowness. The Coens recently demonstrated that the genre needn’t glorify fools, and yet Meyers doesn’t define Erica and Harry much beyond their professions–and even those are just facile class markers (like Erica’s obsequious references to Diane Sawyer and Carly Simon). Moviemaking this haughty isn’t really for most of us; we’re simply meant to kowtow to the good life, cued by Sinatra-lite standards (although Meyers’ use of Eartha Kitt’s "C’est Si Bon" is a good change from routine) and the chic wardrobes (Harry wears a knockout white seersucker shirt and Erica sports a slimming white turtleneck sweater). No movie this greedily bourgeois should wear the title Something’s Gotta Give.

In What Women Want, Mel Gibson’s good comic performance couldn’t overcome Meyers’ male-baiting, quasi-misogynist conceit. The film became a ridiculous, haut-Hollywood fantasy. But Keaton and Nicholson are always psychologically and sensually grounded–Harry nervously kicks his foot out from the bedsheets like Guy Madison in Till the End of Time, and Erica lies back, her arms splayed, in anticipation of ecstasy. These gestures say a lot even though Something’s Gotta Give isn’t well-thought-out. It compares poorly to Alan Rudolph’s great mature love story Afterglow and to Peter Chelsom and Warren Beatty’s Town & Country, a flawed but superior examination of sex and class. Chelsom and Beatty contrasted urban-dwellers’ latitude with Hamptons-dwellers’ autonomy. Meyers doesn’t ponder the complexities of human nature within a class setting. It’s up to Keaton and Nicholson to provide enough substance to bail her out.

As written, Erica is an unlikeable character, but Keaton creates her own personal narrative that is a landmark in female screen portraits. Keaton originated a particular kind of punctilious WASP playing the scared, over-protective mother in The Other Sister. Here, as a hostile divorcee who reluctantly opens herself up to romantic emotion and dependence, Keaton relays a private sense of hurt that is never exposed to the world. Keaton seems to whirl inside her character’s emotions, giving the sense that Erica’s vulnerability is as insular and deceptive as the wealth that makes her seem inviolable. Her range of emotions is wider than any younger actress could convey, plus Keaton’s charm–her openness–makes Erica a much more interesting older woman than the hateful bitches that Charlotte Rampling plays (and gets overpraised for) in Francois Ozon’s movies. Keaton’s lovelorn characterization is in a league with Julie Christie in Afterglow and Katharine Hepburn in Summertime.

Too bad Meyers betrays Keaton with a fake typing/crying montage and a love vigilante speech Erica makes to her daughter ("What are you waiting for?") that is a sop to audiences used to hearing platitudes. Keaton’s real message is the magnificent fount of emotions that define a human being who risks showing affection. This great instinct–this daring–is what makes Keaton compatible with Nicholson. Erica strains to be poised even when feeling rattled, which complements the way Harry dejectedly grows a beard when he feels abandoned (it makes him resemble Orson Welles). Keaton and Nicholson show both the joy of being together and the terror of being alone. They make Meyers’ contrivance worth seeing by contradicting it with truth.

El Bonaerense
Directed by Pablo Trapero

The title refers to crooked B.A. cops, a tougher joke than anything in Bad Santa, the decadent holiday preference of audiences who choose to escape from the world’s moral imperatives through dumb hipster irony. Trapero’s film conveys a healthy disgust with such cynicism. His New Year’s Eve sequence memorably envisions a holiday turned hellish–a wild, funny perception of society’s chaos. The biggest joke of all is if you think this movie is only about Buenos Aires. That makes El Bonaerense–and not Bad Santa–the season’s most truly subversive movie. El Bonaerense has only a few showings left at Film Forum, but enterprising moviegoers who petition for an additional theatrical pick-up will be well rewarded.