Great actors can elevate decent movies. They can take a rather obvious (and much too long) romantic comedy and imbue it with more laughter than it deserves and more grace than its sometimes clunky script should allow it. Luckily then, for Nancy Myers' Something's Gotta Give, she was able to land two.
Diane Keaton (in a role written specifically for her) and Jack Nicholson are superb in this messy film and manage to keep it afloat. That some of the humor derives more laughter from the real-life personas of the two stars than from an actually clever written line is perhaps beside the point, though worth noting. (Had "Jack" not made this film, the humor wouldn't be what it is, and such is the case a good deal of the time for Keaton as well. If you cast this film with Robert Duvall and Meryl Streep - fine actors though they are - you would lose a great deal of the humor in the situation. I mean let's face it, seeing Jack's bare butt is just plain funnier because he is, well...Jack Nicholson. The devilishly clever ladies man, the guy who sits front row at most Lakers games and every Academy Award ceremony, the legend behind the sunglasses. So, it's funnier because it's him, his butt. Yes, I really just wrote that line.)
The film itself, as previously hinted at, is nothing particularly special. It's hardly bad, surely writer/director Myers knows her way around somewhat, and manages to stir up some genuinely funny moments. But it can't quite be classified as "really good" either, mostly owing to its length and purely maudlin moments. A good 30 minutes, and probably even Keanu Reeves character altogether, could have easily been trimmed without really hurting the overall film. Which is not a slight to Reeves either, he is fine and appropriate here, it's just that his character doesn't really add all that much to the film other than further complications that take longer to resolve in the end. And, if you buy the last thing he does in the film, you're living in la-la land (and I have something to sell you).
Harry (Nicholson) is a 63 year old man, never married, rather famous bachelor, who refuses to date any woman over 30. He is happy with his life, and has done well for himself, and is quite good at being elusive and keeping serious relationships of any kind at bay. When first we meet him, he is on his way out to a beach house with his young girlfriend, Marin (Amanda Peet). The house is actually owned by Marin's mother, a famous playwright named Erica (Keaton). Each thinking the other wouldn't be there for the weekend, they both show up, which allows for a well-played "meet cute" between Harry and Erica, who thinks he is a burglar of some sort. It is uninspired moments like this that the two actors somehow manage to make funny, time and again, throughout the film.
It probably goes without saying that Erica and Harry hate each other. And that Marin and Harry break up. And that Erica and Harry eventually learn to care for each other, and then, eventually, to fall for each other. These things happen rather predictably - though Harry's heart attack while fooling around in the bedroom with Marin is quite the funny scene - and the film marches swiftly on. But then, it just keeps going. The pacing that Myers seemed to have worked at keeping rather tight and focused starts to sprawl out in search of more story than it needs to have. Complications continually ensue, ad naseum - and I'm not exactly sure why. Again, it's not that some of these moments don't work, but rather that I was never quite sure why so many of them needed to be there. One possible answer might be that Keaton and Nicholson play so well off of each other that it was hard to cut any of their footage down, which would make sense, but put it on the alternate cut on the DVD or something, right?
The ending comes about in a way we knew it would about 90 minutes before it does, but it still tugs at the heartstrings, and is played effectively enough by the two leads as to tie up things rather nicely. We believe in the ending because it's made sense since the beginning and it always feels right to be right. The performances across the board are quite good - with a special nod to Frances McDormand's brief turn as Erica's sister - and the music is usually quite sharp; "Ma Vie en Rose", which is used much too often to lend a Parisian mood to films, is actually quite properly used here as a leitmotif of sorts (Nicholson himself croons the song over the final credits, sounding surprisingly good). Thus Something's Gotta Give may not be a wonderful film, but it is decent enough, and you could do a whole lot worse this holiday season than to spend time with two legendary actors doing battle and falling in love.
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