"IT'S COMPLICATED"

Written and directed by Nancy Meyers, starring Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, John Krasinski, and Lake Bell.

"It's Complicated' is a "high-end" flick, by which I mean that everyone in it is rich, very upper-middle class white. The only people who appear in the film with a darker skin color are Jake's (Alec Baldwin) new wife, Agnes (Lake Bell) and son, Pedro (Emjay Anthony),and some of the help in Streep's huge, successful, bakery/café, musicians at a party, Harley (John Krasinski of "The Office"), who comes off as swarthy, next to the others, and, also Baldwin, with his dark hair and rugged Irish looks. This is not a BAD thing, per se. It's just that audiences in big cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York are going to have a hard time relating to these characters, the situation, and the location. Jane, played by Meryl Streep, has been divorced from Jake for about a decade. Her home appears to be upstate New York, on an estate miles from even so much as a village, like the one where Jane has her bakery. There are rolling, grassy hills, abundant trees, white fences bordering lush pastureland, but no livestock.

I have tried to like Meryl Streep, really I have. I do like her when she plays driven, focused, tyrannical women as in "The Devil Wears Prada," "Rendition," and others. Yet, in the past couple of decades, most of her characters are similar - - discombobulated, embarrassed, giggly females. And, in this film, Meyers has Streep gasping for air and fanning herself with her hand at her throat like a 19th Century Southern Belle, about to call for the fainting chair. At one point, after hearing Streep laugh at - - really nothing, I said to myself, "Oh, stop. Why are your laughing?" Streep's very next line was just that: "Why am I laughing?" In "Complicated," she's all this and much, much, more: She's Martha Stewart and Julia Childs. Her "Martha Stewart" is a woman who has it all: a successful business, three gorgeous successful 20-something children - - a son, Luke (Hunter Parrish), who just graduated college, two daughters, one who's engaged to Harley and is planning her wedding (a wedding planner scene is de riguer), the other just moved out to be on her own. Jane lives in a lovely, rambling, one-story home, with a perfect vegetable garden (one assumes she grows all her produce for her fabulous dinners and café/bakery). Her red cabbages are all of a certain size in perfect rows, in fact, everything in her garden is in well-ordered rows. Her tomatoes - - plump and red. She reprises her Julia Childs role at home and in her bakery. She takes us and Adam (Steve Martin) through the steps for making perfect chocolate croissants. She cooks elaborate meals for her visiting children who've all descended on her to go to their brother's graduation.

What doesn't make sense is that, okay, she's divorced, her children have moved out. She's an empty-nester sans hubby. Yet SHE'S EXPANDING HER HOME!to get the kitchen she's always wanted! plus an upstairs bedroom for the view. Martin, in one of his best roles, plays a successful architect who owns a large, thriving firm which employs at least a dozen people. In one scene, Jane and Adam climb ladders on the roped-off layout of her expansion so he can show her the scene she'll have from her new bedroom. "Look," he says, and the camera pans over what? Tile rooftops and some trees overhung by a smoggy sky? Wow!

The crux of the film has to do the fact that her husband, Jake, divorced her for a much, much younger woman, Agnes (Lake Bell), who has an ornery eight-year old son, Pedro. Jake and Jane travel in the same circles so run into each other at garden parties and family events. Their children still love their father despite what he's done to their mother and want them to get back together. Jake goes to Luke's graduation alone (Pedro came down with stomach flu). She, the kids, and Jake chance to stay at the Biltmore. The kids go off to their own celebration and Ma's not invited, of course. She ends up in the hotel bar and orders a safe pinot noir. Then what the hell, give me a martini straight up. Who should sidle up on the next stool? Jake. After several drinks and dance, they end up sleeping together and thus begins an affair which brings color to Jane's cheeks, and life in her step. There's the requisite gab fest with Jane's gal pals, complete with three kinds of her freshly baked pies, served with the proper desert wines, where she divulges her affair, to the shock and delight of her friends. Jane realizes the irony that she is the other woman in her husband's marriage. In every scene with Agnes, Agnes comes off as a shrew. She wants to have kids; Alec can't produce. They go to a fertility clinic. Pedro is a real pain in Jake's ass. Yet to show Jake is a very loving Dad, Meyers includes a tender scene of him gently putting his sleeping step-son to bed. Still, Jake misses Jane and all he's lost.

Meanwhile, Jane is succumbing to the charms of Adam. Jake sees them together at yet another party for Luke, yukking it up and dancing after having toked on a joint Jake had left for Jane. He is not happy. He and Jane dance. Agnes looks on and sees that he is still in love with his ex-wife. You see her sadness in her eyes and for the first time, she comes off as a character with dimension.

I liked the film. I laughed, but in the end, I just didn't care about these people who have it all and more and yet still want more. I did think that seeing older actors, showing their age, playing characters falling in love, making out, talking about what aging does to one's body; basically having mature, engaging conversations, and having fun was a wonderful antithesis to all the dorky Seth Rogen coming of age movies and the like that have surfaced over the past decade.