Not for folks under 40: Nancy Meyers' Something's Gotta Give

 Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Amanda Peet, Keanu Reeves, Frances McDormand. Dir. Nancy Meyers, Columbia/Warner Bros., 2003 ****

Sometimes I have to be old enough for a movie, and not in the sense of needing ID. When I saw Something's Gotta Give in 2004 I was an immature 37. I had never been involved with a woman for longer than six months. I was enrolled in broadcasting school and doing well, though I spent the first three months working overtime to fail, which I saw as my one real talent. I had never held the same job more than ten months. Immature, hell, I was 11. On my best day. 

Consequently, Something's Gotta Give could have been a French film without subtitles for all I understood of it. I watched the whole thing, so you'd think I must have laughed or had some kind of reaction that kept me going until the end, but I don't remember doing so. I do remember ejecting it from the dvd player thinking it inexplicable two of my favorite actors would sign on for such a load of crap. 

Sixteen years later, I'm still not the poster boy for mature middle age, but I did live with a woman for two years and we did get engaged. I still don't check most of the other boxes, but by my late 40s reality began to assert itself in ways that my youthful illusions could no longer deny. Sooner or later every boy realizes he won't grow up to be Mickey Mantle, the saying goes, and if in my case the Mick looks more like Francis Ford Coppola it still holds true. 

The trite cliches my parents uttered about life moving fast and passing me by turned out to be trite and cliche and 100% accurate. As well, the body began its betrayals. The thick black head of hair gave way to the thick black hair of ears and nose. At 37, I still averaged a sexual thought every 3.2 seconds. At 53, I can go 32 minutes. Sometimes 3.2 hours. I'm no longer growing vertically but horizontally. Also at 53, Something's Gotta Give went from untranslated foreign film to plain English and from inexplicable crap to romcom gold. 

Diane Keaton plays 56 year-old playwright Erica Singer, the divorced mother of Amanda Peet's Marin, a 30 year-old auctioneer dating Jack Nicholson's Harry Sanborn, a 63 year-old entrepreneur who owns the second-biggest hip hop label in the US. Erica discovers their relationship when she and her sister Zoe (Frances McDormand) surprise Harry as he rummages in the refrigerator at her beachfront house in the Hamptons. It's a meet-cute moment that sees Erica call 911 as Zoe brandishes a meat cleaver, the tension only diffused for a moment by Marin's entry and confirmation of their involvement. As her shock subsides Erica's disapproval pushes the awkwardness and tension up and over the previous mark. Deciding to share the house for the weekend, the moment almost screams "HIJINKS AHEAD." 

When Harry experiences a mild heart attack during foreplay with Marin, his attending physician, Julian (Keanu Reeves), an ardent fan of Erica's plays, refuses to allow Harry to return to the 'City for a week, though Marin and Zoe have to go back to work, leaving Erica and Harry as unlikely and unhappy roomies. 

If you're thinking the rest of the plot telegraphs itself I can only mark your scorecard partially right. While most of the story beats follow the standard romcoms pattern - they fall in love and into bed, they fall out of love through an inability to trust or say what they feel, they eventually reconcile and live happily ever after - it's the way Meyers's screenplay takes them through those beats, and the chemistry between Keaton and Nicholson, and their ace comic timing that makes Something's Gotta Give more than standard . 

Watching playboy-for-life Harry (about whom New York Magazine has written a profile entitled The Escape Artist) and uptight, anxious Erica ("she wears turtlenecks in the summertime," Harry marvels to Julian) fall for each other made me laugh and cheer aloud. They discover they understand each other, that age has given them shared experience and values. At 37, I probably rolled my eyes at their agreement that time has flown by. At 53, it's as trite and cliche and absolutely true as my parents' warnings. 

Writer/director Meyers, a frequent collaborator with Keaton, constantly inverts the tropes and cliches, the characters and story never saying or going quite what, or where, I expected. Sure, Erica and Julian hook up as she rebounds from Harry, and also sure, she turns their week together into her latest hit show ("most succesful female playwright since Lilian Helman,") and yes, of course, it all ends in Paris, where Erica and Harry agreed to go for her birthday, but I didn't expect Erica to be there with a marriage-minded Julian. I didn't expect Harry to feel her play cheapened their affair, nor that it would send him on a months-long cross country quest to visit all his former flames and ask what he might have done better. 

I also didn't expect Reeves to play light comedy with such ease, making me wonder why the hell we had to suffer through all that pontificating, po-faced nonsense of the Matrix trilogy. Nor did I expect Frances McDormand to be so memorable for so little screentime, and I never expected Jon Favreau, whom I love as a director and loathe as an actor, to be so tolerable in his cameo. I DID expect Peet, whose career I've reevaluated upward over the last couple years, to play a 30 year-old girl-woman with such ease. I have no idea why I judged her so harshly in the Aughts. 

My friend Marc Edward Heuck, a great film historian - & the Movie Geek on Comedy Central's Beat the Geeks back when - said of Nancy Meyers "she's great at sympathetic portraits of people over 40" and I must agree. Meyers uses comedy to make some keen observations about what divorce and middle age do to women, making them interesting to everyone except middle aged men. She doesn't reduce Harry to a womanizing stereotype, either, painting what looked to me like a dead-accurate picture of an aging boy-man learning that, if growing up hurts it's still miles better than continuing as he is. 

"Turns out the heart attack was easy to get over. You...were something else. I finally get what it's all about. I'm 63 years old and I'm in love for the first time in my life." 

If I have any quibble with Something's Gotta Give, it's small but needs to be said. Meyers has Keaton dismiss hip hop for its vulgarity, violence, and misogyny early in the picture. While true, invoking her feminism doesn't alter that affluent white women telling urban blacks how to appropriately express their experience is not a good look, especially these days. It plays like what it is: an entitled Boomer bitter that pop culture is no longer for her. 

That moment aside, Something's Gotta Give makes a strong, if so far unheeded, argument that we could use a few more middle-aged romcoms. I know I could, now that I'm old enough to understand them. 

-- Russ Wait