ROMANTIC COMEDY; 2hr 1min
STARRING: Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin
Ingredient ex: Streep and Baldwin
How great it is to spend quality cinema time with bright-spark lookers over the age of 50 — especially when one of them is the divine Ms Meryl. She’s perfect, of course, as giving and generous Santa Barbara divorcee of 10 years Jane Adler. Jane is an empty-nester with three grown kids, who, as luck and the wiles of writer-director Nancy Meyers (The Holiday ) would have it, re-teams with her ex-husband of 19 years (Baldwin), now unhappily married to a much younger woman (Lake Bell).
Being well-heeled with her own swish bakery-cum-restaurant, protective close girlfriends and a great house, Jane thought she had moved on. Now, to her effervescent dismay, here she is with a sly-dog lawyer ex-husband-slash-lover. She also has a shyly interested architect (Martin) on the side. But this dance is a Streep-and-Baldwin special and as twirly-whirly as it is, it also raises real questions about accountability — and whether what is lost can ever be regained. They’re raised in a really fun and sunny way but they also make total emotional sense, for like its leading lady, this is the whole gorgeous, grown-up package.
