It's Complicated

It’s Complicated is the title of a new Meryl Streep movie and a
succinct synopsis of the dilemma facing actresses of a certain age.
Meryl Streep is sixty and, while she continues to age beautifully,
you are not impressed in the same way you are when someone
mentions that Diane Keaton is 63 or that Dame Helen Mirren is
64 (and still posing in bikinis). In other words, no exclamation
points will ensue. Still, like Scott Baio being “46 and pregnant,”
Meryl Steep headlining movies at 60 years of age is both re-
markable and noteworthy.

Not only is Meryl Streep starring in movies, she is starring in
blockbusters. Her last three movies have a combined worldwide
box office of $777 million, and that includes the relatively paltry
$50 million Doubt brought in.

How is it possible that Meryl Streep has become bankable at
sixty? Not only is she bankable at sixty, she is sixty and playing
the lead in a sex farce with two men vying to be her lover and
not one but two sex scenes although, like the fan dancer Sally
Rand, she never shows more than a little leg.

Not to digress but has there ever been a sweeter mouth out of
which to hear a foul word? Who besides La Streep could have
delivered the classic “cocksucker suit” line from Sophie’s Choice
with such casual naiveté? Who else but she could have delivered
the line “I’m a little bit of a slut” in It’s Complicated with such
coquettishness (at sixty!) that she comes across as anything but.

Nancy Meyers, reprising her dual roles of writer-director, is at
the top of her game plowing fertile ground she has plowed before
(2003’s Something’s Got to Give). In fact, Meyers is compiling
sort of a cinematic dissertation on the sexuality of post meno-
pausal women. Meyers has given Streep a great ensemble cast
including actresses of certain age: Rita (“Mrs. Tom Hanks”)
Wilson, 53, Mary Kay (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) Place,
62, as two of Streep’s quartet of stalwart gal pals (Molly "V.I.P."
Culver, 42, and Alexandra “In Living Color” Wentworth, 44 -
how did they get in here? – are the other two) and two former
leading men, Alec Baldwin, 51, and Steve Martin, 64, as the duo
seeking to make her the object of their affection.

It is telling that Meyers has cast the younger Baldwin as Streep’s
husband and, as her grown, toothy and very blond children, actors
Zoe Kazan, 26, Rosalie Ward and Hunter Parish, 22, who could
easily be playing her grandchildren. This is noteworthy because
like male actors her age and stature, Streep is playing a character
younger than her actual years with a co-star nearly ten years her
junior. To put this in context, in 1962, the thirty-seven year-old
Angela Lansbury played the mother of the thirty-four year-old
Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate, and Miss Bette
Davis and Miss Joan Crawford, fifty-four and fifty-seven,

respectively, had their last true starring roles opposite one

another in Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

The complication of the title is the continuation of Streep’s nascent
and unexpected affair with her bombastic ex-husband (Baldwin)
while she is falling in love with a sweet but once burned divorcé
(Martin). Both the twinkly Streep and the subdued Martin exhibit
exquisite comic timing but Baldwin continues his Emmy-winning
renaissance as a comic actor by stealing scene after scene (an
honorable mention goes to The Office tested John Krasinki as
Streep’s non-plussed son-in-law to be). With his increasing girth,
Baldwin appears completely at ease in his excess skin. His per-
formance as an undisciplined man temporarily freed from the
prison of his impulsive mid-life train wreck of a remarriage to a
much younger woman (an anorexic, neurotic and very scary
Lake Bell) is a joy to watch. He eats scenery the way he devours
Streep’s exquisite on-screen cooking, greedily, lustfully and
lovingly.

One thing that is not complicated is how enjoyable It’s
Complicated proves to be.

~rave!