Not that Meyers — a global brand whose films have surpassed $1 billion at the worldwide box office — is particularly more charitable (or honest) when it comes to her male characters, who are on hand mainly to act like pigs, usually by ignoring radiant women of their own age in favor of hot-to-trot chippies, only to belatedly realize how good they had it in the first place. Nothing if not an "auteur," Meyers spent most of the '80s and '90s married to the filmmaker Charles Shyer, with whom she collaborated on the comedies Private Benjamin, Baby Boom, and Father of the Bride, and it's telling that the solo features Meyers has made since their divorce (What Women Want, Something's Gotta Give) have increasingly felt like poison-tipped valentines to her former partner. (Meanwhile, as if to complete the cliché, Shyer struck out on his own with the 2004 remake of Alfie, starring Jude Law as a cockney cock-of-the-walk who treats women like Kleenexes.)
In Meyers' most thinly veiled work of self-portraiture to date, Streep's Jane Adler has been sidelined by her philandering lawyer ex, Jake (Alec Baldwin, giving a ham performance), in favor of the 30-something Agness (Lake Bell), who, in the natural order of the Meyers universe, is a ball-busting gold-digger eager for Jake to sire her child. (Cut to fertility clinic waiting room jammed wall-to-wall with similar May-December "romances.") When Jake and Jane cross paths at their son's college graduation, it isn't long before they fall back into bed while Meyers' shopworn comic tropes fall into place: naked 50-somethings examine their flab and contemplate plastic surgery; naked 50-somethings feign horror at the sight of fellow naked 50-somethings. And, just for good measure, everybody must get stoned.
Watching this garish fiasco (little helped by the flat, stolid cinematography that has become the norm for American screen comedy), I found it mildly depressing to see Streep, a spry comedienne in the films of Albert Brooks and Spike Jonze, hurdling through this gauntlet of strained whimsy, her every toothy smile and throaty chortle more affected than Sophie Zawistowski's Polish accent. That was before I realized that Jane's soft-spoken, silver-haired divorcé architect, Adam, was being played by none other than Steve Martin, in what may be the most anesthetized, emasculated performance he has ever given. Then I was really depressed.
Meyers has Jake remark that his and Jane's fling is "very French of us," shortly before Adam calls up and invites Jane to a French film festival. If the French Meyers admires so much made a farce about two ex-spouses having an affair the characters wouldn't be drawn in such robust caricature, the screenplay riddled with such reductive assumptions about the battle of the sexes.
In a key moment, Jane frets over a dinner for Jake, only for him to stand her up. Cue montage of a forlorn Streep wrapping up leftovers and blowing out candles. Meyers supplies a reason for Jake's absence, but the real explanation is this: She wouldn't know how to write the scene in which he actually shows.
