Dir. Ben Younger, US, 2005, 105 mins
Cast:
Uma Thurman, Meryl Streep, Bryan Greenberg
Review by Carol Allen
This is a romantic comedy about Rafi, a photography producer (Thurman),
and David (Greenberg), an artist, who lives with his grandparents.
Rafi is still emotionally raw and in therapy from a recent divorce.
David is looking for a serious relationship. Oh, and she's 37, he's 23,
which is the first obstacle to their romance. "I have T-shirts older
than you", she tells him. However, as Thurman is a great-looking woman,
who looks years younger than her biological age (35 when she was making
the film), and Greenberg is a cute and mature-looking young man, they
still make an attractive and feasible screen partnership with a
convincing chemistry. So, despite the disapproval of Rafi's
sophisticated circle of friends, who virtually audition David, when they
meet him, the romance proceeds, with the initial approval of Rafi's
therapist Lisa (Streep), who is pleased that her client is now opening
up to a new relationship.
There is a second obstacle however. David is Jewish, Rafi a lapsed
Catholic, so his family disapprove, even before meeting her. But what
we know and they don't is that Lisa is David's mother, and when she
finds out that her patient is also her son's new girlfriend, she's faced
with a right dilemma - her responsibility to her patient versus her
horror at the match. Streep's face when listening to Rafi talking about
her brilliant sex life with David is an education. Streep has a bit of a
chequered history when it comes to playing Jewish characters, fromSophie's Choice back in 1982 to Heartburn - where her WASP approach
clashed with Nora Ephron's very New York Jewish lines - and her recent
eccentric performance as a male rabbi in Angels in America. In this
film, she pitches it just about right. She doesn't overdo the Jewish
clichés, her dilemma rings true and her sense of comedy is spot on.
In many ways, this is a rather sweet old-fashioned romantic comedy but
with a bit of bite. Towards the end, the obstacles that Younger, who
also wrote and directed the much tougher film Boiler Room, sets in the way of the lovers get a bit artificial and he does give Lisa rather a
lot of moral lessons to mouth, but he has written a witty script,
created convincing and likeable characters, and this is one romantic
comedy where I really didn't know, whether we would get the
expected happy ending or not.
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