Something's Gotta Give

Take the first scene. Amanda Peet is a beautiful young woman with an education, a fascinating job, and a wealthy, famous mother. So naturally--it just makes so much sense--she throws herself at the ancient, witless, overweight buffoon, Jack Nicholson. She can hardly wait to drag him back to her mother's fabulous beach resort for a weekend of physical frivolity.

This was the film's first brilliant point, and exactly mirrors the problem that many of us in middle have begun to encounter. So you know, I'm a 52 year-old balding insurance salesman--admittedly not as old as the Jack Nicholson character--and I can't stick my nose in a restaurant, bar, theatre or bookstore without some lithe 24 year-old, bikini'd bimbo trying to drag me to the back room for a couple of minutes of frisky frolic. What is with these girls? Why can't they find somebody their own age? The movie hammered this home: of COURSE I empathize with the Jack Nicholson character. It's about time a film addressed this very critical societal issue, a problem all men my age must face.

Now the potential flaw to this theme is that the Nicholson character is at least several decades older than me, but the film overcomes this possible stumbling block by inundating us with the famous Nicholson charm. No, not a charm based on wit and humor, as you might expect, but a far more effective one: by having him gasp and wheeze and weakly speak his every line in feeble befuddlement, the filmmakers cleverly show how pitiful he is. Clearly, no nubile, youthful, gorgeous female on earth could keep her hands off him.

But the brilliant points of this film have only just begun. For the Nicholson character is then attracted to the mother. Of course! Just like me, he prefers the company of women his own age. But the problem is this: like him, every time I find a skinny, hermetic, wrinkled-up old broad I'd like to hang around with, sure enough, a young, rich, handsome doctor-type comes along and sweeps her off her feet. It is an unbelievably frustrating and common problem to all of us 52 year-old, balding insurance salesmen, and it is to the film's great credit that it has the undaunted courage to finally address this major societal controversy.

There are so many other things to say about the artistic magnificence displayed in this film. Even I, wise and experienced as I am, can not pretend to know everything. For example, I've never been to a gangster-rap, hip-hop type party, and have always been fascinated to see what one might be like. The film portrays this brilliantly. How interesting to see that get-togethers like this are mostly populated by aging white people sipping cocktails, and that the background music resembles nothing like hip-hop or rap at all! This is daring, risky moviemaking, and succeeds in foiling our expectations brilliantly.

But it is the ending which almost defies description, and brings these divergent parts to an artistic whole. For Mr. Nicholson, after a searing, tragic, heart-breaking journey of self-discovery, decides to reclaim his aging, prune-faced amour in Paris. She has gone there, unbeknownst to him, with the young doctor, and for an idyllic week of wine, dining and romance. To the film's great, daring credit, the young doctor, with his loved one and his dreams in the City of Light, immediately abandons her, boldly conceding that he cannot hope to compete with the weight, the age, the experience, and the overall unshaved ineptitude of Nicholson's drooling stinkpot of a character.

It is a wonder to behold.


Something Gave Up   May 30, 2004
D. Mikels (Skunk Holler)
29 out of 57 found this review helpful

If this movie had been a meal I would have sent it back for being overcooked; either that, or just tossed it in the garbage. SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE gave me anything but an enjoyable story; instead, this "romantic comedy" about a sixtysomething play boy finding love for the first time with an attractive, "mature" woman just floated along like an unmanned rowboat in the middle of a lake. And it floated on and on and on and on. . .

There's nothing redeeming about Jack Nicholson's character, and the actor plays the role in his usual creepy and disgusting manner. Meanwhile, Diane Keaton plays Nicholson's flighty and hysterical love interest--albeit a very attractive one. And for Keanu Reeves to be the odd man out of this love triangle requires a suspension of disbelief in proportion to the Grand Canyon. (Which is exactly where the script should have been thrown.)

'Nuff said. SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE gets two stars for Keaton being so easy on the eye, and an inspiration for all of us middle agers. Now if I could just get the dog to eat this, but he doesn't want any part of it, either.
--D. Mikels


The Ultimate Romantic Comedy For Baby-Boomers   January 21, 2004
Antoinette Klein (Hoover, Alabama USA)
25 out of 28 found this review helpful

Thanks, Hollywood, for remembering that while we baby-boomers are not your prime demographic we are still around and yearning for a great movie like this to make us laugh all the way to retirement.

Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton are fabulous playing roles not that far removed from their real lives. Jack is Harry Sanborn, a sixty-three year old entrepreneur who doesn't believe in dating anyone under thirty. Diane is Erica Barry, a highly successful playwright ("the best since Lillian Hellman") who has had an emotional shutdown since her divorce. Romance and sex are not even options for her and Harry is not at all attractive when she first meets him half-naked while he is preparing to bed her daughter. Their relationship is best described as intense dislike at first sight but when he accidentally see her naked, it goes to full-out hate!

You might have a good guess as to how this will turn out, but there are so many twists along the way you might not get exactly what you were expecting. What you will get is a great, feel-good movie to have you laughing a lot and thinking "how true, how true." When the relationship hits the rocks, Erica is able to turn her humiliation and rejection into a Broadway hit that features a male chorus line of Dancing Harrys replete in hospital gowns with peek-a-boo backs as well as every romantic and not-so-romantic line Harry ever uttered to her.

Keanu Reeves is a most delectable piece of eye candy, but it is Frances McDormand as Erica's sister Zoe and Amanda Peet as her daughter Marin who give great supporting performances. Also good to see Paul Michael Glaser, albeit in a very small role.

If you're under thirty, just tell your Mom and Dad to see it. But if you're over 40, don't miss this. Hollywood may not permit us to see the likes of it again.


Weak, even for its target audience   February 27, 2004
Filmbuff (Hong Kong)
20 out of 30 found this review helpful

Where "Lost in Translation" showed us a complex giving relationship between an older man and a younger woman, "Something's Gotta Give" is unrepentantly nasty about such relationships, which it sees as inevitably a character flaw in the older man.

At the same time it wants to have its cake and eat it by making no such criticisms of relationships between older woman and younger men.

It's not hard to see that the audience demographic for this movie is baby boom women who don't much like the idea that many men of their generation are now dating younger ones, but heartily applaud Cher and Demi Moore for their May/December romances.

In "Something's Gotta Give" Jack Nicholson's Harry Langer gets criticised for his interest in younger women. Frances McDormand as a woman's studies teacher laments that older men can date younger women but that older single women can't get dates at all. A former husband, played by Paul Michael Glaser, is criticised for wanting to remarry - inevitably - a younger woman.

Yet despite that, not only does Nicholson's character finally fall for older female playwright Erica Barry, played by Diane Keaton, so does Harry's young doctor Julian, played by Keanu Reeves. (And Keanu Reeves as a doctor, and an enthusiastic and astute intellectual judge of plays, is perhaps the film's biggest single bad joke.)

But even the better actors are disappointing. Jack Nicholson just does his Nicholson as bad boy schtick, a far remove from his superb performance in "Schmidt". Oscar nominated or not, Keaton gasps a lot.

It's an awful audience-pandering film, and one that will enjoyed pretty much only by precisely that sector of the female audience to which it is pandering. And it's set in a bizarre fantasy world. Doesn't writer and director Nancy Meyers know that Broadway is a highly competitive place these days, and that plays like the stuff Keaton's character writes wouldn't even get an off-Broadway venue? And yet we're to believe that Erica has got filthy rich from doing this kind of stuff.

And then there's the movie's double standard which merely reverses old sexist attitudes and replaces them with new ones. Older men and younger women bad. Older women and younger men fine.

In the end though the film dissatisfies even those who uphold this new double standard. It's even more conservative than that. Date within five years of your own age people. Even some women critics, to whom you might expect this movie to appeal, have said they don't believe the final scene for a second. Neither do I.

In the nineteen-fifties Douglas Sirk directed the wonderful "All that Heaven Allows", in which a middle-aged Jane Wyman fell for a young Rock Hudson. It was a plea for openness in judging the relationships of others, and it's sometimes depressing to realise that in some ways, and particularly in some PC ways, Hollywood is more conservative now than it was in those days, merely replacing the prejudices of one era with those of another.

Like many others, I lament the fact that Hollywood puts many fine actresses out to seed too early. I do wish we had more romances involving older men AND women. I quite liked - for instance - Australian directors Paul Cox's "Innocence" which was about a love affair between two people in their seventies. But, even - or maybe especially - those of us who'd like to see movies skewed a little less to youth audiences deserve a lot better than the audience pandering of "Something's Gotta Give".