Adultery, with and without adults

Streep, Martin, Santa Barbara

Okay, this is going to be a long review. More than any movie I’ve seen lately, It’s Complicated struck me as a disturbing commentary on modern American society— all the more disturbing because the filmmaker seems utterly unaware of her most obvious message, a message that she shamelessly splashes across the screen: this movie celebrates a life of material wealth and moral poverty.

Streep’s Jane

I saw It’s Complicated for Meryl Streep. I had just rewatched Summertime, David Lean’s 1955 movie with a similar theme. So this was a chance to compare two venerable actresses in similar roles at similar points in their careers:  Katharine Hepburn as a middle-aged spinster, Streep as a middle-aged divorcé— coincidentally or not, both named Jane. There’s a world of difference between a spinster and a divorcé, but both Janes are spirited career women who enter brief affairs. There’s also a world of difference between directors David Lean and Nancy Meyers. Lean’s films range from epic masterpieces like Lawrence of Arabia to small-scale masterpieces like Brief Encounter (which sets the standard for films about adultery). Meyers’s, in contrast, have no range whatsoever: she’s such a huckster for middle-aged American women that she’s become one of the reigning queens of that durable Hollywood genre, the chick flick.

Hepburn’s Jane

Hepburn, it turns out, outshines Streep, but only because Summertime is a vastly superior movie. (I confess, here, that I even don’t think Hepburn was the best choice for this aging-virgin role.) Summertime has an intelligent, literate script, the protagonist Jane is vulnerable but honorable, and the movie was entirely filmed in Venice (in fact, it was instrumental in the ultimate transition of Venice from city to tourist-infested museum piece). It’s Complicated, on the other hand, is a formulaic story set in Santa Barbara, which in this movie looks like it was built last year as a tribute to what money can buy.

With tub and tubby hubby

Money is almost a character in this film. It saturates every frame. “You’ve Feng-shui’d your life,” a friend says admiringly to Jane, whose house is unmitigated Martha Stewart or House and Garden or something: not one item suggests idiosyncratic or personal taste. The focus is on kitchens and bathrooms, the latter having been enthroned as an American fetish. The French have bedroom farces; It’s Complicated is an American bathroom farce. Bathrooms are used for dressing scenes, a private phone call scene, a marijuana scene, and at least one bath scene. Jane even uses a bathroom to describe her feelings: she has his and hers sinks, and the his sink makes her sad.

Now that I live alone, I need another wing.

But Jane is a professional baker, so her extravagance also shows up in lavish kitchens. She already has two, in her bakery and in her home (see top pic), yet she hires architect Adam (Steve Martin) to build her “dream kitchen” as part of  a whole new wing for her empty nest. Seriously– the kids move out, she adds square footage. I kept waiting to hear what she planned to do with her existing elaborate kitchen, or at least hear her ask Adam to design something that could use her present state-of-the-art fixtures, but such practicality would have been a spoonful of reality in this wanton homage to consumerism…