Something's Gotta Give (2003)

Something's Gotta Give arrives from 2003, a year in which a Nancy Meyers production could still be trusted to deliver two hours of linen-draped real estate and grown-up longing without an attached reading list. Jack Nicholson plays Harry Sanborn, a 63-year-old record executive who dates women under thirty. Diane Keaton plays Erica Barry, a 56-year-old Broadway playwright who feeds him soup after his heart attack. The premise reverses the usual arithmetic and the film knows it, staging the age gap as a mild provocation before resolving it into marriage. The provocation is gentle. The marriage is inevitable.

Progressive gestures exist, though they arrive without conviction. Frances McDormand appears as Erica's sister Zoe, a professor of lesbian feminist women's studies at Columbia, a job title that functions as set decoration and nothing else; she leaves the film early and the subject never returns. Harry owns the second-largest hip hop label in the world, a detail the screenplay treats as a résumé line. His fortune is photographed as a perk, never as a crime. Keaton's Erica is comfortable in her skin at fifty-six, undressing for the camera with a shrug, but the film never converts that ease into an argument about beauty standards or aging. It lets her be, which is its own modest achievement.

The film's observations about men, age, and appetite arrive through comedy and character, not sermons. Harry's womanizing gets diagnosed and then forgiven, the genre's oldest bargain. Erica's heartbreak is poured into a play, a device that lets the film comment on itself without lecturing anyone in the audience. The result is a well-upholstered romance with a woman at its center, made by a woman, and a supporting cast that gestures toward a broader world without committing to one. That is a small thing, and the film is content with small things. The house is lovely.