It's Complicated (2009)

It's Complicated arrives from 2009, a year when the romantic comedy still believed in granite countertops and the restorative properties of a well-stocked kitchen. Nancy Meyers writes and directs. Meryl Streep runs a bakery, Alec Baldwin runs a law practice and a much younger wife, and Steve Martin runs a set of blueprints. The premise concerns a divorced couple resuming an affair a decade after the paperwork, which the film treats as a scheduling problem instead of a moral crisis. Santa Barbara glows. Nobody wants for anything except, briefly, closure.

The cultural inventory is thin, and honesty requires saying so. The cast is white, the milieu is white, and the film has no interest in remarking on either fact. There is no engagement with race, no environmental conscience, no scrutiny of the comfortable wealth on display. That affluence is not examined. It is upholstered. A marijuana subplot exists for slapstick and nothing else. On the subject of representation, this is a sealed room with excellent lighting.

The single faint signal is the filmmaker herself, plus a willingness to treat a woman's midlife appetite as a subject worthy of a movie. That is a modest distinction, not an argument, and the film never builds one. Meyers wants us charmed. She is not interested in instructing us, and she does not try. No lesson is delivered, no finger is raised, no viewer is scolded. A pleasant, well-furnished fantasy about second chances remains, and a reminder that not every film carries a message. Some just carry a casserole.