It's Complicated

It’s Complicated is the new comedy from writer-director Nancy Myers (Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday), Hollywood’s patron saint of movies stuffed to the gills with cashmere sweaters, copper pots and very rich white people. Meryl Streep plays the divorced owner of a posh Santa Barbara, California bakery-restaurant; She laughs a lot with her rich women friends and flirts with bright, emotionally bruised architect Steve Martin, who is designing an addition to her already mammoth home. During a reunion trip to New York to see her newly graduated son (Hunter Parish), she gets swept into a passionate sexual affair with her attorney ex-husband, Alec Baldwin, who is unhappily married to the much-younger, thoroughly unpleasant Lake Bell.

What might have been a formulaic, harmless time-waster manages to be a quick, funny, entertaining pleasure. Myers clearly loves Hollywood golden-age comedies that paired, say, Irene Dunne or Claudette Colbert with Cary Grant, because this one, though all sexed-up for modern audiences, is cut from the same escapist cloth. Witty writing and winning performances by Streep, Martin and a flat-out scene-stealing, star-turn performance from Baldwin—along with solid, charming support from John Krasinski as Streep and Baldwin’s son-in-law and Zoe Kazan as one of their kids—make this one an ideal movie choice after gorging on food and drink at the holiday table. It’s Complicated ought to make a lot of people smile at a time when we sorely need it.