A romantic comedy that's both smart
and
sweet?
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Rafi (Uma Thurman) has just signed her divorce papers. She's 37 and does something with fashion photography (we never find out what exactly); she's also emotionally shattered. Alors, what better time to start dating a 23-year-old painter from Brooklyn, Dave (Bryan Greenberg)? But her delighted therapist, Lisa Metzger (the beautifully frumpy Meryl Streep) applauds Rafi's movements toward normality, happiness and an active sex life-"It's not like you've had his name tattooed on your tokhes," she tells her wryly. "You're both at your sexual prime…have fun!" Lisa of course has her own problems; her own 23-year-old son Dave has recently started dating an older woman, and worst of all, she's not Jewish...This is the point at which, if you've seen the trailer, you swear on your father's grave that you will never ever pay money to see this movie-because even after Lisa figures out that Rafi's involved with her son, she 1) doesn't tell her client and 2) keeps treating her. The film's only concession to professional ethics is to have Lisa meet twice with her own therapist (a cameo from Madhur Jaffrey) for some lame supervision. Why she doesn't have her LCSW stripped from her and tar and feathers applied liberally to her own tokhes, we'll never know.
***image2***Don't let the gimmicky plot device keep you from seeing this movie, though, because in the film's second half all this nonsense fades into the background as Rafi and Dave struggle with the serious issues of making a relationship work when one half of the couple is ready to be a parent and the other half still plays Nintendo. While the screenplay is threadbare, and the laughs are largely manufactured (most painfully, Dave's mannerless best friend; also a running gag with a bellman at Rafi's apartment building that wasn't funny to start with), at its heart
Prime
is a bittersweet romantic comedy built along the lines of
Annie Hall
(or maybe, more accurately,
Something's Gotta Give
); it also joins the rash of recent older-woman-younger-man movies like
Lovely and Amazing, The Good Girl, Tadpole, p.s.
, and
Rushmore
. While Bryan Greenberg isn't much of an actor, he doesn't need to be-he just needs to be gormless and eager and sincere; whereas Uma (fortunately, since she has to push the wet noodle of a script uphill) is magnificent and we find ourselves wondering where she's been, aside from various incarnations of
Kill Bill
. Writer-director Ben Younger (
The Boiler Room
) has given us that rare thing, a romantic comedy that-more or less-actually works.
