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I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the work of Nancy Meyers. On the one hand, she’s a successful female director, writer and producer who gave great roles (in films of varying degrees of success) to Goldie Hawn (Private Benjamin), Whoopi Goldberg (Sister Act), Meryl Streep (It’s Complicated) and Diane Keaton, her most frequent collaborator. But she also tends towards toothless, overly sweet middle-class romantic comedies that hit all of the tropes of the genre without expanding their vocabulary much.
I understand that it’s radical enough to stick two middle-aged people in the center of your romantic storyline, and that’s great, sex and love don’t end when you hit thirty-five, but Something’s Gotta Give still hits every cliché as it shuffles on. It’s an enjoyable enough piece of fluff, but there’s something much better lurking beneath the surface. Look, you don’t cast actors with as much baggage and charisma as Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton and not expect your audience to hope for a bit more fun, a bit more brains to go along with the story beats. Nicholson and Keaton have been cast here as variations on their media personas, but allowed to bring the real heart and expand the emotional inner life of those facades in brief moments that the film needed more of. I would’ve cut away with the extended sequence of Keaton crying and gone with more of the quiet character building moments.
Having said all of that, the film does have other problems (Frances McDormand, Jon Favreau and Amanda Peet are wasted in slightly written roles), but I still found myself laughing and enjoying the journey. It’s a bit too thin of a premise for two hours of running time, but I’d watch Nicholson and Keaton in just about anything and get even the tiniest of enjoyment out of it. I liked Something’s Gotta Give a lot more than that slim amount of praise. They’re both given pretty stellar roles (Keaton in particular plays the hell out of it), I just wish the rest of the film had risen to their level.
