Dir. Bart Freundlich, US, 2009, 95 mins
Cast: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Justin Bartha
Review by Carol Allen
This is not the greatest ever rom com but it's entertaining and it has considerable charm.
Zeta Jones plays Sandy, who becomes a single mother when she discovers her husband is cheating on her and she leaves. She gains our sympathy from the very opening, when it looks like we're in for another dose of perfect home life in the American suburbs just like in the commercials but no, this feisty lady escapes all that and takes her two children away to New York and a new life. She does though have to find a job and indeed fairly soon lands a rather good one with a New York sports network, which means she needs a nanny. The person she hires is a young man Aram (Bartha), who works in the coffee shop underneath her apartment and with whom she's struck up a friendship. Aram is at a crisis point in his life, having just discovered that his French wife of two weeks only married him to get a green card and the marriage is over before it's began. It seems like the perfect solution. They get on well, he has little else going on in his life and he likes the kids and they soon become a cosy little alternative family unit. But things get complicated when Sandy, who is 40 and Aram , who is only 24, realise they are falling love.
Now this is not as daring or original as the makers possibly think it is, in that there's nothing particularly odd about a 15 year age gap, particularly when the man looks older than 24 and the woman younger than 40. It might have been a good idea to have a couple of supporting roles in the film of a younger woman with much older man to make the point that the other way round is regarded as much less of a big deal. The only thing that makes her seem rather older than him is that the very beautiful and poised Zeta Jones is a more experienced actress and more subtle in her playing. She's very likeable in this. Bartha has a gauche charm and a good rapport with the children, which is appealing and he and Zeta Jones work well together as a romantic couple. There's also a good cameo from an almost unrecognizable Art Garfunkel as Aram 's dad.
Both Sandy 's and Aram 's character seem to have a lot of bossy people in their lives. There's his controlling mother (Joanna Gleeson), her sexually predatory best friend (Kate Jennings), her ex-husband (Sam Rob ards) and her children, who are right little smart alecs a lot of the time and whose diction, I might add, leaves a lot to be desired. There's also an enjoyable performance from Rob Kerkovich as Aram's best mate Mitch, who's an aspiring actor, though a sequence where the couple go to see Mitch in an interminable actors showcase – 46 scenes and no interval - fails to make the most of its comic potential. And as Aram is Jewish, it would have been good to have more of the Woody Allen style of New York Jewish humour in the writing.
There are though many times when the film's very funny, as in a sequence involving a man hating female teacher at the women's group, where Aram also works part time, who uses the poor guy quite literally as a punch bag and the occasional use of slightly gross out humour works well, as with Sandy's date from hell early in the film, who doesn't appear to have ever heard of the concept of washing your hands after using the toilet.
The film rather loses its way in the last quarter, when Sandy experiences an unconvincingly lightly handled ectopic pregnancy, which comes over more as an excuse to bring their relationship to crisis point and a later montage of Aram travelling all over the world doing good deeds with black and brown children, while she forges ahead to great heights in her career, is distinctly soppy. But it's only a movie, not real life, and for most of its length this is pleasant, undemanding and often funny entertainment.
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