There doesn’t seem to be a place for the over-50 crowd in Hollywood anymore. Despite the fact that a great deal of directors, producers and movie stars have reached this age, they seem to remain in denial. Whereas the 70’s and 80’s had its share of movies aimed at this age range, the new Hollywood is leaving them in the dust, leaving the eminent angry young men and women of the70’s (now in their 50’s and 60’s) to take on character roles or roles a good ten or fifteen years younger than they really are. I suppose this was the basic idea behind Something’s Gotta Give: to make an intelligent, romantic film aimed at an age group that’s been neglected for a while. Unfortunately, the end result is hardly that.

Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson) is a hip-hop producer (!) who’s dating young auctioneer Marin (Amanda Peet), who’s at least 30 years younger than him. They head out to her mother’s gigantic house in the Hamptons for a romantic weekend… unbeknownst to Erica (Diane Keaton), who is a famous playwright who’s secluded herself to work on a new play. Harry and Marin decide to stay anyway… until Harry has a heart-attack and is instructed by his doctor (Keanu Reeves) to remain in bed. This means Harry must be left alone to recover with Erica, a woman he can’t stand. But suddenly, Harry, who never found himself attracted to women his own age, is having a change of mind. Oh, and, because Keanu Reeves is expensive, he also falls in love with Erica.

Something’s Gotta Give exists in a parallel universe where Jack Nicholson and Jon Favreau are believeable as rap producers, where 55-year-olds flirt using Instant Messaging, where Keanu Reeves not only reads plays but is also a honest-to-God doctor. It’s one of those films about rich people that equates rich with hip; it assumes that all rich people are also keeping up with current trends and have the attention span and musical tastes of your average suburban teenager. Something’s Gotta Give plays like a teenage rom-com with old people instead of freshly scrubbed twentysomethings ripped from the headlines of Seventeen magazine. There’s nothing here that really indicates that this movie should be targeted at an older audience.

A great deal of people my age seem to dislike this movie because it features nudity by people older than thirty as well as the fact that it comes up with the “absurd” notion that people still have sex once they start to sag. I’m not one of those people; in fact, I’m glad to see a movie that stars people old enough to remember what Nixon looked like… but that’s exactly what’s wrong with this movie. It prides itself about being about mature people in love and negates this entire point by having them act like 13-year-olds. The nadir of this comes in not one but TWO scenes in which Nicholson and Keaton flirt via instant messaging while IN THE SAME HOUSE. It’s a movie with no real audience; older people will find absolutely nothing to identify themselves with these people, and kids will undeniably be grossed out by it. Strangely enough… the film made 125 million.

Despite its potentially interesting concept of age in romantic relationships, the film comes off as safe and tame as any of the expendable romantic comedies released in mid-January. Blame it mostly on director Nancy Meyers, who draws back every time the film seems to be going somewhere good. The film takes the road most traveled by and ends in a way that everyone could have predicted. The best romantic comedies are the ones that have something to say about relationships… but there’s nothing here. Everything the movie tells us was told before in much, much better movies.

Thankfully the film’s cast makes the pill a little easier to swallow. Nancy Meyers is not a good director but the talent she picks for her films shows a certain potential as a casting director. Jack Nicholson is just that; Jack always plays himself to a certain degree, but this is the ultimate example. It’s pretty hard to mess up playing yourself (although Steven Segal is always here to prove us wrong) and when you’re Jack Nicholson, it’s pretty much impossible. Nicholson plays it broadly but he remains enjoyable. Diane Keaton goes broad too, and it doesn’t suit her all that well. I’m as big a fan of her as anyone, but she comes off as trying too hard (especially in the elongated crying scene that, while funny, goes on about a minute too long). Keanu Reeves, to my great stupefaction, isn’t too bad in this movie. He still sucks (it takes a hell of a lot to make him any good) but at least he just sucks in the background instead of dragging down the entire movie as he has before. Rounding out the cast are Amanda Peet and two criminally underused roles for Frances McDormand and Jon Favreau (he seriously has like five lines in the entire thing).

Nicholson scored pretty big last year with About Schmidt, a film that was problematic but covered more or less the same territory. True to popular belief, pretty much everyone I know hated it. I suppose, then, that this is the way we like to view this generation: wrinkly adolescents who seem to have come full circle. Something’s Gotta Give is bland rom-com material taken to places that I’m not sure exist; it’s a movie that seems to have been made with no audience in mind. For what wants to pass off as fluff, it comes off rather… disquieting. If there are any people of the characters’ age who feel like this movie speaks to them… we’re worse off than I thought.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older