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A Sony release. Written and directed by Nancy Meyers; starring Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton and Keanu Reeves. Released to DVD on March 30, 2004.  When people learn that I write about film for a living, the first question that pops out of their mouth is: "What have you seen that's good?" Privy to the inside track, advanced screenings and interviews, people tend to assume that I have a magic movie that I'm hiding somewhere that they have neither seen nor heard of. When I cite a certain example, I am usually met with an incredulous expression and the follow up question: "Wait, you think that's good?" The point is that no two people can ever have the exact same opinion or viewing experience. Everyone brings his own biases and personal history to each new movie he sees. With this in mind, it's pretty hard to get any uniform consensus about any given project. And it is here that an important lesson can be learned. Other people can be right too. I, for one, disliked Sam Raimi's Spider-Man immensely. I didn't like the huge gaps in the script and I didn't like the complete lack of character development in the villainous Green Goblin. I could, however, easily understand why other people fell in love with the film. I just wasn't one of them. In the case of writer/director Nancy Meyers' latest film, Something's Gotta Give, not only did I not enjoy the final cut of the movie, I couldn't fathom why anyone else would either. Relatively fresh off of the box office success of 2000's What Women Want, Meyers returns with nearly the same movie here, minus the interesting hook. In Something’s Gotta Give, an older man (Jack Nicholson) has a reputation for being a womanizer. His new acquaintance (Diane Keaton) holds this reputation against him. When fate interviens, here in the form of a heart attack, the two have the opportunity to spend some one-on-one time together, grow very close and both realize that they could stand to learn a little bit more about themselves and life in general. Where What Women Want was an abomination to women--they can't all be thinking about shoes and how fat they are--Something's Gotta Give stands out as being categorically insulting to its audience. The script, as written, just isn't believable. Keaton's character, Erica Barry, is a disaster. Obviously still hurting from her divorce from her first husband and the resulting and severe self-image problems that accompanied it, Barry goes from headcase to cool and collected in the span of 72 hours. Nicholson's character, Harry Sanborn, is equally chaotic. Frightfully afraid of commitment and his own mortality, Sanborn is a joke among his own social set; it's a well-known fact that he only dates women who are under the age of 30. Once Sanborn meets Barry, he goes from a serial monogamist (to put it politely) to a man who genuinely seems interested in tackling his neuroses and phobias. Barry also uses this three day time period to deal with her fears about Sanborn's age, fidelity, reputation and the fact that he had his heart attack while he was trying to have sex with her eldest daughter, Marin (Amanda Peet).  When their inevitable break up takes place--Sanborn is cleared by doctors to leave Barry's house--the extent of their 72 hours of soul-searching becomes evident; Sanborn quickly begins dating young women again and Barry embarks on what can only be called one of the scariest scenes of all time where she suffers first a fit of hysterical laughter, which quickly morphs into a fit of hysterical crying, all while typing her latest play, a not so heavily camaflauged look at her three day relationship with Sanborn. By the time Barry and Sanborn meet up again some months later in Paris, the question weighing on my mind wasn't 'Will they get back together?' but 'Why should these two get back together?' Only in Hollywood could two people this dysfunctional form a partnership and walk together into the sunset, convinced that they were finally going to be happy. I guess the movie's true happy ending--Sanborn and Barry remaining separated and then getting extensive amounts of therapy so that they would be able to have a real and meaningful relationship in the future-- just wouldn't have had the marketable impact that Sony was looking for. Having served as both director and producer on films like What Women Want, The Parent Trap and The Father of the Bride, Meyers employed a number of very amateur shooting techniques here in Something’s Gotta Give, the worst being an almost rear-projection like blue-screen scene involving Nicholson and Peete in a convertible together. She also allowed several obvious errors in continuity to make it into the final cut of the film. There is a positive to Meyers' seeming lack of directorial acumen: when you get bored with watching Keaton and Nicholson interact, just start counting how many cameras and C-stands you can see reflected in the characters' sunglasses. Keaton and Nicholson do occasionally rise above the ashes of this project, a fact belying their individual talent levels, but those remarkably hard-to-find moments do nothing to off-set the overall feel of Something's Gotta Give. As best as I can see, Meyers continues to succeed as the director of romantic-comedies because there are simply no alternative films being mass-released to America to give her brand of blatantly bland and formulaic movies a run for its money. | |||||
