"Something's Gotta Give"

Why must every character in American films who revels in sexual pleasure realize he's been leading an empty life? Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton do their best, but can't redeem this irritatingly moralistic romantic comedy.

By Charles Taylor

Dec 12, 2003 | I never realized how deeply some women loathe men who date younger women until I saw the dirty looks I got when I took my 25-year-old niece out to dinner. (I used to kid her that I was going to get a T-shirt that said "She's my frickin' niece!" for our evenings out.) Forty years ago it was socially acceptable to look askance at racially mixed couples. Now it's politically correct to deride the combination of older men and younger women. As oodles of magazine articles will tell you, this new "social paradigm" has left women past 40 feeling as if they're no longer attractive, as if men no longer desire them, etc. You can't blame the women who have been dumped for younger women for feeling hurt and betrayed. But hurt feelings are a lousy foundation for criticizing the entirety of older male/younger female relationships, and there's something unattractively self-righteous about the collective pity party that has developed around the issue. The blanket disapproval of dating outside your age deserves no more respect than we accord to disapproval of dating outside your race or your religion.

This is the territory in which the new comedy "Something's Gotta Give" treads. Writer-director Nancy Meyers ("What Women Want") belongs to that school that has all but ruined American romantic comedy by turning it into the movie equivalent of one of those women's glossy articles about relationships and dating and sex. We're no longer expected to go to romantic comedies for anything so trivial as to laugh or be charmed -- we're there to improve ourselves, deal with "issues" and, hopefully, emerge with greater "empathy." Although Meyers intends it as a joke when, toward the end of "Something's Gotta Give," we see the events of the movie transfigured into a Broadway comedy, it seems perfectly fitting.

"Something's Gotta Give" is exactly the kind of "adult" dreck that you'd expect to see on Broadway. Its movie lineage is "serious" comedies like "As Good as It Gets" that are said to touch a nerve and transcend the genre. How good a comedy can you expect from people who have so little respect for the form they're working in that they set out to consciously transcend it? In a year of terrific comedies like "School of Rock" and "Bad Santa" and "A Mighty Wind" (every one of them funnier and more touching than anything in "Something's Gotta Give"), and after the sympathetic treatment of a romance between an older man and a younger woman in Sofia Coppola's exquisite "Lost in Translation," Myers offers an especially egregious example of Oscar-chasing.

The setup for "Something's Gotta Give" has Jack Nicholson as a late middle-aged impresario dating Amanda Peet, the latest in the series of young women he beds. Peet's mother is a playwright (Diane Keaton) whose success is measured by having a house in the Hamptons. Nicholson and Peet repair there for a weekend getaway only to find Keaton in residence. Keaton can barely contain her disgust at her daughter's being involved with a man Nicholson's age, but before he can make his getaway he suffers a heart seizure that necessitates that he stay put at Keaton's place while she nurses him.

It's a situation lifted right from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's play "The Man Who Came to Dinner" (and Meyers tries to cover her swipe by having Keaton say she feels like a character out of a Kaufman and Hart play). Anyone who's seen a romantic comedy knows that Keaton's prissiness and Nicholson's hedonism are the excuses for an opposites-attract scenario, and before long the two have fallen into bed.

Give Meyers this: She's found a sly way of presenting all the usual prejudices against May-November romancing. She isn't doctrinaire. She doesn't overtly give in to the cattiness that has of late made younger women a target for older feminists. We see Keaton acting incredibly rude to Nicholson, who takes her disdain graciously. And Meyers complicates things by having Keaton courted by Nicholson's young doctor, played by Keanu Reeves, and having to face all her unexamined convictions that a younger person cannot be attracted to an older one. It's a smart choice. You'd have to work pretty hard to find Keanu Reeves, who may be the best-looking man in contemporary movies, unattractive -- especially when his performance has the sort of casual ardor this one does.

But it's a rigged game. Keaton's character is given a sort of wisdom that Meyers seems to be saying is entirely the virtue of her sex. Her affair with Reeves is accepted, but Nicholson's character has to learn that he has just been on a quest for pleasure and correct the error of his ways. In other words, an older women who beds a younger man is embracing her sexuality; an older man who pursues younger women is just a poon hound.

Next Page: No, Keaton isn't playing Annie Hall again -- it's another stunning performance in a career that's been full of them

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