Word: janes
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...would like to say that writer/director Nancy Meyers' film is cause for celebration, but it's a bit more complicated than that. Meyers has written some astute scenes about aging and regret, heartbreak and hope. In the role of a successful businesswoman - Jane owns and operates an upscale bakery/café - who finds herself in the unlikely position of having an affair with her ex-husband, Streep is radiant, funny and endearingly vulnerable...
...Meyers demonstrates, as she did in Something's Gotta Give and The Holiday, an extraordinarily limited worldview. Her heroines are allowed just one problem, and it will never, ever include a lack of taste. Jane's semi-rural Santa Barbara home is a hydroponic dreamland, where tomatoes grow implausibly round and fully ripe in springtime. Her spacious, beautiful kitchen is filled with shelves of cake plates and creamy white platters, just waiting for this formerly unappreciated domestic goddess to fill them with homemade bounty. Producers of porn employ "fluffers" on their sets. I believe Meyers, as a producer of lifestyle...
...trailers, is so odious that the affair makes little sense. It's not Baldwin's fault; he's good at being bad, and Jake's awfulness does lend itself to comedy of the oh-no-he-didn't variety. "Home!" Jake proclaims, as he lies in bed with Jane after their first sexual encounter in a decade. This would be sweet, if he weren't saying it as he's clapping his hand over her groin with all the subtlety of a baseball player adjusting his cup. It's almost as if her womanhood was chattel he mislaid...
...missed his first wife/second mother's roast chicken and chocolate layer cake. He's missed sharing nuclear family time with Jane and their three grown children, Lauren (Caitlin Fitzgerald), Luke (Hunter Parrish) and Gabby (Zoe Kazan), who look and act as though they've been ordered from the J. Crew catalogue. So what's in it for Jane? We understand that she wants the validation of finally hearing her husband admit he made a mistake. The second wife, Agness (Lake Bell), is a huge disappointment: temperamental, with "a big job," a demanding child who diminishes Stepdad Jake every chance...
...dramatic tension to feed that plot line. Men are babies, Meyers is telling us, and only a humble one like Adam, who was cuckolded by his ex-wife, is really worthy of any successful, independent woman's while. Speaking of Adam, you know how he and Jane met? He's the architect on her remodel. Apparently Jane needs a bigger kitchen. All those cake plates of hers must be feeling squeezed for space...