Movie Review - It's Complicated

On Monday night, Shing and I went to go see It’s Complicated in Berkeley. We actually spent a lot of time weighing the merits of bad yet entertaining action versus comedy (probably with cheese) and more introspection. Complicating things (pun not intended), at least for me, was that Shing refuses to see Shutter Island or The Wolfman. So we found ourselves choosing between Up In The Air, It’s Complicated, From Paris With Love, and The Book of Eli.

As you can guess, we ended up picking It’s Complicated despite it’s obvious chick flick potential. Shing doubted that I actually wanted to see the movie at all, but I tried to explain that I thought it would be funny and that I like Alec Baldwin, Meryl Streep, and Steve Martin.

If you haven’t seen the movie, but have seen the previews, there shouldn’t be any real surprises. If you haven’t seen the previews, here’s a quick synopsis. Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin are both very successful people and had been married for 19 years and then divorced. Alec left Meryl for a much younger woman and Meryl is single. When Alec and Meryl’s son graduates, the family comes together and Meryl and Alec start having an affair. This complicates their lives since Alec is married and Meryl just started seeing Steve Martin.

What can I say, the movie was what we expected it to be. There are some scenes in the movie that are very funny. Also, Alec Baldwin, Meryl Streep, and Steve Martin were each terrific in their roles. Their characters had depth and realism – they understood themselves and their feelings; they knew that their bodies had lost a bit with age; they knew how to be patient. And this only comes through with very seasoned actors. The younger actors in the movie were disappointing to me – they were very one-dimensional and unbelievable. This left me wishing that the writers had spent as much time developing them as they had the key characters.

It’s definitely a movie worth seeing, but you can wait for Netflix if you haven’t seen it yet.