In New York for their own son's college graduation, Jane and Jake find themselves in the same hotel, the same hotel bar, and then, after a few bottles of red wine, the same bed. With roses blooming again in her cheeks and the sparkle back in her eyes, Jane attracts another beau back in Santa Barbara. Adam (Steve Martin, subdued) is the architect hired to redesign, as metaphor would have it, Jane's kitchen and her bedroom.
Do we root for Jane to find that love is lovelier the second time around? Or for her to literally and figuratively rebuild a new life?
As carefully styled as an Architectural Digest layout, It's Complicated is less antic than prior Meyers comedies (What Women Want, Something's Gotta Give). The humor isn't bubbly, it's sticky. As a consequence, except when the wily Baldwin and skittish John Krasinski (as Jane's prospective son-in-law) are on screen, the movie is more a chuckle-inward than laugh-out-loud affair.
Meyers knows what women want: the chastened playboy. And boy, oh, playboy, Baldwin is as riotous as Mel Gibson and Jack Nicholson were in her previous hits. The hirsute Baldwin, a knockabout motormouth who spends much time during the film unclothed, resembles Porky Pig - only carpeted shoulder to groin in shag rug, and ready to shag. Few things are funnier than a man of appetites indulging them all, simultaneously.
Does Baldwin's boisterousness overwhelm Streep - or does the actress fail to establish her own tone and tempo? Their scenes together should bounce, but more often than not they thud. They don't find each other's live spots. Nor - except in a sequence where they smoke pot and go to a party - do Streep and Martin.
