A
film review by Roger Ebert, written on March 7, 2012.
There
must be a better reason to have a baby than to provide a plot point in a
rom-com. Don’t you think? Friends with
Kids is altogether too casual about parenthood, and that supplies a shaky
foundation to a plot that’s less about human nature and more about clever
dialogue. As a light entertainment, it has its pleasures, but at the end I was
left with feeling sorry for the poor kid who emerges as such a great
convenience.
We
meet three couples who live comfortably in New York City and Brooklyn. They
apparently chart their progress through life by comparing themselves to one
another. That’s possible in the sealed universe of a movie, although in life,
most couples have more than four friends, and there’s a certain turnover rate.
Not
here. Jason and Julie (Adam Scott
and Jennifer Westfeldt) are very
best friends who live in the same apartment building. They date around and
don’t have romantic feelings for each other — something they keep repeating
lest we forget. They form what their friends treat as a virtual couple: They’re
not married, they’re not sleeping together, and yet at a dinner party, you
routinely invite them together.
Ben
and Missy (Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig) are married, and were
once in such deep lust, it was a standing joke in their circle. As passion has
worn off, they are gradually suspecting there was never much else, and friends
who once basked in the glow of their love now shiver in the chill of their
sniping.
Leslie
and Alex (Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd), the Brooklynites, are
closer to normal, comfortable with each other and announce we’re pregnant! That’s one of the final straws for Jason and Julie,
who are both increasingly fretful that they’re childless. They’re aware their
clocks are ticking and decide to have a baby with each other and sidestep the
whole marriage and divorce routine. They’ll date other people, split the
baby-sitting and child care 50/50, and everybody will be happy, right?
Rather
soon after they have this ideal child, they do indeed start dating other
people: Jason meets Mary Jane (Megan Fox),
and Julie is literally pushed into the arms of Kurt (Edward Burns), who is such an improbably nice man, he borders on
parody. I always wonder exactly what dating
other people means. Is it assumed it won’t affect the ideal platonic
friendship Jason and Julie began with? If they fall in love with those other people, how do those ideal people
handle the notion of each contributing 25 percent of the baby-sitting and child
care (and presumably costs) of the kid in the middle of all of this? How is
this explained? How would you feel if you started seeing someone and he/she
explained, I love you enough to marry you
and share with you a child I had with my best friend, who is still very much in
my life and who we will be seeing every day and always have to live near?
My
guess is, it wouldn’t go over. The old-fashioned marriage and divorce routine
has a lot to be said for it. Friends with
Kids isn’t constructed as simply a comedy and intends to have a measure of
sincerity and even truth at its heart. But it smells off. It feels like an
artificial screenplay concoction that’s perhaps pitched at moviegoers 15 or 20
years younger than the stars — audiences who don’t have the experience to
understand the whole child-sharing scheme is cockamamie.
Yes,
and we all know where the plot is headed, anyway, because if there’s one thing
we know about a rom-com, it’s that conventional values invariably must win in
the end. It’s almost painful to watch characters jump through the obligatory
story hoops in the third act. Even presumably real people don’t behave like
this. [Ebert’s rating: ** ½ out of 4]
Labels:
comedy, drama, romance
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