It’s Complicated director Nancy Meyers is in the business of making romantic comedies for adults.  The youngest of the film’s three leads in her latest effort is 51 years old, yet the film still manages to be more romantic, funnier, and yes, even sexier than many of the films currently out there starring 20-somethings.  Of course, it definitely helps when your three elder leads are 15-time Oscar nominee Meryl Streep and 2010 Oscar hosts Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin.

Streep and Baldwin play Jane and Jake, who ended their fifteen-year marriage ten years ago.  Jake has since remarried the much younger Agness, but he’s currently unhappy.  Jane, meanwhile, is struggling with the fact that the last of their three children has just moved out.  When in New York for their son’s graduation, the two find themselves alone and inebriated.  One thing leads to another and a complicated affair begins.  As if that weren’t a complicated enough scenario, Jane finds herself warming up to her nice guy architect Adam, played by Martin.

I find Meryl Streep to be a very interesting case in the Hollywood community.  It seems like most actresses must work their way up through the ranks when they’re young, making romantic comedies and other genre flicks before they earn enough street cred to take on more challenging roles in “award” films.  Streep, on the other hand, has seemed to have done it in reverse.  In her younger days she took on a lot of what might be considered more “serious” roles.  Now, 15 Oscar nominations later, the actress finally gets to play; and she’s still getting Oscar nominations.

Although Julie & Julia is the film that she’s receiving all the much deserved Oscar buzz for this year, her work in It’s Complicated should not be overlooked.  She’s delightful, doing an excellent job of blending her joy in the affair with her caution at its wrongness.  She also believably plays both drunk and high in this movie.

Alec Baldwin is equally up to the challenge as the other half of the affair.  He’s a bad guy, on the most basic level, as he is an adulterer times two, but he’s such a charming guy and it is easy to see that he has always only been in love with Streep’s Jane that it is just hard to dislike the guy.  This makes you feel all the more sorry for poor Steve Martin, who plays the nice guy that is inevitably going to receive the short end of the stick.

There is a star of the younger generation in the film as well, that being John Krasinski as the fiancé of Jane and Jake’s oldest daughter.  At first, I thought it was a very odd role for such a recognizable actor, but then a plot development that I won’t reveal turned it into brilliant casting.

I really enjoyed this film, maybe even more so than the previous Nancy Meyers’ romantic comedy for adults, Something’s Gotta Give, to which this movie will endlessly be compared.  The movie is full of laughs from start to finish and all of the characters are entertaining and worth rooting for.

The movie also touches on how divorce can affect the children, and this would be the only place I would say the movie fails.  The kids just seem too perfect, and although they may have come from a broken family, it certainly doesn’t seem to be very dysfunctional.  That is, until now.

It’s Complicated is rated R for “some drug content and sexuality.”  The rating is definitely appropriate, mostly for the very adult dialogue and a little too much of Alec Baldwin without clothes.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jeff attended a promotional screening of It’s Complicated.