"Something's Gotta Give"

The obstacles Meyers faces in her little object lesson are, oddly enough, her two leads. She manages to keep Nicholson from overacting in a role that might have been an all-out Jack-fest. Essentially, he's playing the image of himself that has been created from gossip magazines. Nicholson's small triumph is that he doesn't do it grossly. His character doesn't have the romance in his soul to be called a Casanova, but he's far from a jaded Don Juan. He doesn't lie to the women he's involved with about what he expects in a relationship, and from all appearances he treats them well. Nicholson gives a relaxed performance as a man who -- at least in the initial scenes -- knows himself, is happy with the choices he's made and has been lucky enough to live as he wishes.

But this is an American movie, and if there's one ironclad rule it's that every character who revels in sexual pleasure, even one who appears to treat his partners with tenderness and respect, must sooner or later realize that he's been living an empty life. Even Amanda Peet, attracted to Nicholson because her romantic life is similarly noncommittal, learns what she's been missing and settles down. Not only that, she gets pregnant, and Lord knows that's a sure sign of maturity. The conception of the role (if not Nicholson's performance) seems to be that it's a Jack Nicholson movie for everyone who tsk-tsked when they saw those gossip-column pictures of him with Lara Flynn Boyle.

At her best, Keaton is so good that she almost ends up validating the movie's hypocritical premise. At first she's just uptight in a way that we're meant to find funny but is simply grating. Her scenes after she goes to bed with Nicholson are amazing, in that direct way Keaton often is. The cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, has filmed Keaton so that we can see the lines on her face, and that's to the movie's credit. She looks like a woman approaching 60 (she'll be 57 in January) and Meyers presents her as if to say, "Middle age can look damn good." On Keaton, it does. Her finest moments are the scenes right after she goes to bed with Nicholson and finds herself weeping with gratitude -- not that a man has deigned to make love to her, but because she's once again feeling a part of herself she thought was dead.

Keaton plays the exhilaration and confusion of these overwhelming emotions with the simultaneous desire to take the plunge back into romance and the fear of going too fast and scaring off her new lover, and she's superb. She puts flesh on the movie's fashionable thesis, which is more or less that the culture's preoccupation with youth makes older people (not just women) undervalue their beauty and sexuality. I'm sure some viewers will make the usual comments about Keaton -- that she's just playing Annie Hall again. But that was said in the '80s when she was turning in one stunning performance after another in pictures like "Shoot the Moon" and "Mrs. Soffel" and "The Good Mother," no two of them alike. She's doing something here unlike anything she's ever done. It's just a shame that this is the movie she's doing it in.

Given that feelings of being sexually unattractive are common to a lot of people past 40, the movie isn't honest about how feeling attractive to younger people can be a great ego boost. It's fine for women, Meyers tells us, but a sign of immaturity in men. She gives us no reason, though, to trust her idea of maturity. "Something's Gotta Give" is smooth in the manner that passes for craft in contemporary Hollywood (it has handsome production values, but not much panache or style and only a serviceable sense of structure). But it's so goddamn middle-aged.

Keaton's character is working on a play set in Paris, and the soundtrack is filled with songs by Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf, and also includes Louis Armstrong's recording of "Le Vie en Rose," all music that should appeal to anyone whose heart is still beating. But they're all presented as if they were nifty items that had just been picked up at Pottery Barn. What we see of Keaton's work is like some godawful collaboration between Neil Simon and Wendy Wasserstein -- bland, mature entertainment that pulls laughs and tears in mechanical show-biz fashion. (And at 125 minutes, this movie is a punishing length for comedy.)

If all Meyers had set out to do here was to say that our cultural standards of beauty are narrow, and that sex still can have a pull on us in middle age, who could argue? But better movies have trod this territory. "Bull Durham" didn't stint on sex or romance in a story about the inevitability of compromise. The great line given Danny Aiello in "Moonstruck" about why men chase women -- "They fear death" -- has more insight and sympathy than anything here. And Keaton herself starred in the great American movie comedy about middle age, Woody Allen's "Manhattan Murder Mystery" (overlooked, but his best movie since "Annie Hall") which dealt with people looking at their settled lives and wondering what they've settled for.

What people settle for in "Something's Gotta Give" doesn't seem such a prize. Meyers ends up telling us that older people are going to be much happier with someone their own age, and that younger people had better settle down and start making babies if they want to avoid that empty feeling. Meyers' last movie, "What Women Want," is the highest-grossing movie ever directed by a woman. "Something's Gotta Give" makes me shudder than anyone would take her word on what women want.

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