In It’s Complicated, the author Nancy Meyers (who also directed) constantly uses the idea of French films as a metaphor for what is happening in her story. And she’s exactly right. The pitch line for this movie, a woman has an affair with her ex-husband who left her for a younger woman years earlier, is exactly the sort of thing the French, with their “oh, so adult” sense of relationships, would do. It would star someone like Catherine
Deneuve as the wife and people like Daniel
Auteuil and Gerard
Depardieu as the ex-husband and the new boyfriend. It’s hard to say that the French would do it better; they have their hits and misses. But for me, It’s Complicated never does quite rise to its sophisticated occasion. Everyone works very hard, especially Meryl
Streep as the wife who has become the other woman. She’s constantly laughing or flailing her arms or rolling her eyes; if a line
isn’t working, then her body sure is. Alec Baldwin probably gives the best line readings of the leads, he seems so relaxed, though Steve Martin has some wonderful scenes being stoned. In the end, however, it’s John
Krasinski as
Streep’s future son in law who has the best double takes and gets the most laughs. It’s hard to say exactly why it
doesn’t work as well as one would want. It has all the right ingredients. But perhaps the clever script
isn’t quite clever enough and perhaps Meyers
doesn’t quite have the right Gallic touch for the material. Perhaps
Streep’s friends and her children are just a bit too much of a drag. Perhaps everybody’s just trying too hard. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I don’t know. It’s complicated.
Sherlock Holmes may on the surface be about the famous Victorian detective, but the movie, or at least the best parts of it, are about a straight married couple (Holmes and Watson) going through a divorce made all the more difficult because one is marrying someone else and the two are still in love with each other. Gee, this sounds awfully like the movie It’s Complicated. It’s not, though I would have to say that in many ways calling the plot to Sherlock Holmes complicated might be a very apt description. This was the part of the movie that
didn’t really work that much for me. The evil plan put forth by Mark Strong’s Lord
Blackwood has something to do with destroying both houses of Parliament with the eventual idea of taking back the American colonies which have been weakened by the Civil War. His ultimate goal is world domination, but exactly how reclaiming the United States would help him do just that is somewhat unclear, and therefore just a tad on the camp side (sort of like
Lex Luther wanting to cause an earthquake and have California slip back in the ocean so all his new property will be beach front—actually that makes a little more sense). It also depends not so much on cleverness on
Blackwood’s part, but on such dull plot twists as his taking the easy way out and bribing some jail keepers. But no matter;
Blackwood’s plan may be a tad confusing, but the love spats of Holmes and Watson (played wonderfully by Robert
Downey, Jr. and Jude Law) are very clear indeed. Eddie
Marsan (having a good couple of years) also works well as Inspector
Lastrade, but Rachel
McAdams doesn’t really strike the right cord as a femme
fatale, though it is fun to see how shy and uncomfortable Holmes gets around women. It’s heavily directed by Guy Ritchie, which works part of the time, but at others, gets a bit in the way. The uneven script is by Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony
Peckham and Simon
Kinberg. It’s not a disaster, but not as good as it could have been.
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