Friends With Kids Review
It’s nice to see a movie celebrating all the worst life decisions a couple can make.
So I was feeling kind of melancholy last night when my router crashed, cutting off most of my available media and leaving me with not a lot to do. I could have worked on my commercial site, but was kind of done. This might have been a good chance to hang out with a girlfriend or something, but as I have stated ad nauseum I am miserably and soul crushingly single. So what will help with all these? Probably not a rom com (in fact, in retrospect I can state that watching a rom com by yourself in a huge theater when you are desperately lonely is possibly the worst solution available. It’s like treating heartburn with acid in hopes of burning out the nerve endings in your digestive tract. Somehow I see the Unibomber starting out like this) but that was pretty much all I had to work with (plus a free movie ticket) so I went for it.
Like most R rated comedies these days it was neither bad nor good. It cruised the middle lane of the mediocrity highway steadily for 105 minutes, then in the last two minutes ripped off the ending from When Harry Met Sally and called it a day.
Honestly it watched more like a documentary for relationship counselors than a film. Most modern films follow a three act plot process. Act 1 introduces the characters and possible problems they will have to deal with. Act 2 has the characters develop while looking for the tools to fix the problems. Act 3 resolves the problem (usually with some dramatic flourish) and delivers the characters into their new state of being.
Friends with Kids instead skips the first act, jumps right into the characters as fully developed persons, and more or less putts along at lukewarm until the end, when suddenly a single dramatic scene resolves everything forever. If drama were a bar graph this movie would be steadily at about a 3 for the entirety, with a minor spike to 5 during one dinner party and suddenly shoot up to 8 at the end.
The documentary nature of the film made a lot more sense once I learned that the film was written and directed by the star, Jennifer Westfeldt. She displays a level of self esteem issues no director not emotionally involved with the story would allow. I revise my earlier statement. This film is less like a documentary and more like a movie production of Jennifer Westfeldts personal journal.
All that being said, the film itself, like most documentaries and journals, was refreshingly honest and real. While the two main characters make a fairly long series of bad decisions they do so in a manner that anyone who has ever watched the old 
Jerry Springer show would totally understand (Jerry Springer image courtesy of the TV Show T Shirts). All the characters with two notable exceptions seemed very real and extremely well developed. Dialog was brisk and sharp, and the script overall felt very current, if you know what I mean. I was also glad to see the return of comedic team Kristin Wiig and Maya Rudolph, and was pleasantly surprised to see they could both hold up a non-comedic role admirably.
The story itself feels kind of inane. Julie Keller (Jennifer Westfeldt-Kissing Jessica Stein, Keep Your Distance, Notes from the Underbelly) and Jason Fryman (Adam Scott-the Aviator, Step Brothers, Knocked Up) are both Manhattan yuppies who have a circle of friends that is steadily being siphoned away by the obligations of kids and family. She works for some kind of non profit and is super cute with massive self esteem issues and he is a sleazy womanizer who works in advertizing. Through a seriously convoluted logical train they both decide what they need to meet “the one” is to have a kid out of wedlock. The thought is as best friends with no sexual interest in each other they wouldn’t be buried in the mire it seems their friends keep getting trapped in. If this sounds like an offensively bad idea wait until you hear how much thought they put into the child’s mental well being, which is none.
Anyway, after one of the most awkward sex scenes ever they have a super cute boy, and settle into their single parent lives. Things seem to be nigh perfect. Jason run into and dates Mary Jane (Megan Fox-Transformes, Jennifer Body, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People) who couldn’t have felt more forced into the movie if she had been a pickup truck driving through the plate glass window of a Chick-fil-A. Julie starts dating Kurt (Edward Burns-Saving Private Ryan, She’s the One, the Brothers McMullen-is it me or does he seem like he’s constantly staring out a porthole or something?), who is also super amazing and kind of fake seeming. The fact that in a film filled with well developed and real characters these two seemed kind of fake (and even more fake in comparison) kind of implies that this was a conscious decision on the part of Westfeldt to make them seem like super boyfriend/girlfriend robots, thus making the two main characters seem even more human. I certainly hope so. Otherwise it was just a bad casting decision, although I could spend 107 minutes just looking at a picture of Megan Fox (yes, I am one of those guys. Don’t hate me for having testosterone).
Things sort of come to a head at a big ski trip where on of their drunken friends Joe Hamm (Sucker Punch, Mad Men, the Town) starts asking some pointed questions that should have come up before the whole thing starts like what are you going to tell the kid, etc. Things melt down between him and his wife (Kristin Wiig-Bridesmaids, SNL) while Julie realizes she has immense feelings for Jason. At that point things come to a simmer (in a more exciting movie I might have said come to a boil, but the passion in this film at no point exceeds about a 4). Emotional drama ensues.
The stars. Excellent characters with progressive development for all of them except Mary Jane and Kurt. One star. Well acted all around. Two stars. Really decent dialog. One star. Any film where I can watch Megan Fox is a plus, and while I don’t usually go for blonds I thought Jennifer Westfeldt was super hot too. She has some amazing hair. One star. There were some funny moments I found myself laughing at. One star. Total: six stars.
The black holes. At no point in the film did I feel like the plot pulse quicken. The entire thing was like watching slightly hardened Elmers glue pour down a slide. One black hole. The other thing about Elmers glue on a slide is you can pretty easily predict where it is going, and that analogy holds up for the plot direction too. Really predictable. One black hole. While I felt the characters and decisions were real, the situation they were thrusting themselves into was ridiculous and really badly thought out. One black hole. Yet another rated R movie with no nudity worth mentioning. Also, when did rated R in a comedy turn into feces covered baby taint? Seems to be a lot of that going around lately. One black hole. Total: four black holes.
A grand total of two stars. Meh. Nothing worth rushing out to see, yet nothing preventing you from seeing it if you need to get out of the house or are hiding from someone. Overall innocuous. Nothing on the screen says see it big, so feel free to wait for video. As for my new policy of trying to identify the best place to cut out for a bathroom break, honestly anywhere in this film would work. The bland pacing and predictable nature of the plot means you should be able to infer anything you might have missed. If I had to pick a point I think you could safely miss out on the date/love scene between Julie and Kurt, which starts with them meeting at some school function and drinking punch out of plastic cups. It seemed especially worthless. Date movie? Maybe if you just started dating her. If you are in a long term relationship this might get you started on a conversation regarding kids you should be prepared to have, so only see it if you want to tread down that path.
Thanks for reading. I am going to watch that indie film tonight and review it tonight (for the record it’s called the Arriviste). Feel free to post comments here, and please follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. For specific questions or suggestions email me at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
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