It’s Complicated

Leaning on the natural, effortless ebullience of her performances in Defending Your Life, Mamma Mia!, and A Prairie Home Companion, Streep is immensely appealing as a divorced bakery owner and chef who’s about to be an empty-nester. Alec Baldwin plays her ex-husband, who left her 10 years earlier for a much younger woman (Lake Bell) and fully realizes that he’s a walking cliché. The exes already share a genial relationship, but between Baldwin’s frustration with his current wife and Streep’s pangs of loneliness, old feelings are quickly rekindled. But when Steve Martin’s divorced, unattached architect competes for her affections, too, the situation gets problematical. Or tricky. Or convoluted. Or some such synonym.

Though Meyers soft-pedals the betrayal part of their affair—the scene where Martin discovers the truth is so misconceived, it nearly ruins the film—Streep and Baldwin get the illicit thrill of it just right. There’s something old and something new in their time together, a sense of falling into familiar rhythms while also discovering each other for the first time. Baldwin, importing his devilish grin from 30 Rock, proves very persuasive, and Streep, as a sensualist by trade, can’t help but be persuaded. Her milquetoast relationship with Martin is less convincing, because what she gains in comfort, she loses in spark. It’s Complicated is the sort of “mature” character piece the French do regularly and better (and without the need for quotation marks around “mature”), but the cast at least helps relieve some of the tidiness that belies the title.