Something's Gotta Give

[bix171]

There’s less than meets the eye in Nancy Meyers’ romantic-comedy-cum-ageist/feminist-polemic about a roué (Jack Nicholson) who has an affair with a successful, self-reliant playwright (Diane Keaton), the mother of one of his attempted conquests. Nicholson and Keaton provide a bit of good chemistry but it isn’t enough to overcome Meyers’ whiny tutoring on what women really want, which is apparently to turn men into women. (Meyers’ blunt script makes no bones about it—Nicholson even shouts it out at the end.) As a director, Meyers barely has any presence, preferring to let Jon Hutman’s stale production design carry the load. (It’s also hard to believe the faded cinematography is the work of the great Michael Ballhaus.) As a writer, she seems to think placing erudite Easterners in glamorous locations such as the Hamptons automatically bestows substance on her stilted dialogue, but she reveals herself to be shallow and filled with unpleasant spite: Keaton’s supposedly acclaimed playwright is unmasked to be little more than a hack who finds her revenge in humiliation. Keanu Reeves plays the younger man who comes between Keaton and Nicholson; it would have been nice to see him getting back into the comic form he was so comfortable with in “Parenthood” and “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” but he’s given very little to do and ends up being an unneeded straight man. With wasted, underwritten performances by Frances McDormand and Jon Favreau; Meyers has also found a way to do something other directors could not: sap the delightfully aloof sexuality out of Amanda Peet.