An older-woman-younger-man affair, stickier than normal because the older woman's therapist happens also to be the younger man's mother. The therapist/mother, a bespectacled, beanbaggy Meryl Streep, is the only one of the three who sees the whole picture, who knows that her twenty-three-year-old son, Bryan Greenberg, has become romantically involved with her divorced thirty-seven-year-old client, Uma Thurman. (Quite a long-shot coincidence even in a town the size of Albany, never mind New York City. Still a longer shot: they meet in the queue of an Antonioni bill.) The therapist herself has been a step slow to catch on, since her client at first fudges the age of the younger man as twenty-seven, while her son fudges the age of the older woman as also twenty-seven. The truth, once it dawns, puts the therapist in a ticklish position, wanting to maintain a supportive professional relationship with her client, while not wanting her son to throw himself away on a clock-ticking shiksa. Somehow the tickles never reach the spectator. Streep, working with a muted New York accent, has plenty of good ideas about the demeanor, the posture, the wardrobe of an East Side psychologist, and she has a wealth of facial expression with which to compensate for the self-conscious cuteness, the unnaturalness, the flatness of the dialogue (written by Ben Younger, who also directed). Even were the dialogue snappier, the busyness, the fussiness, of Streep's performance would be sure to play hell with any rhythm. Whenever she's off screen, however, and hers is the smallest of the three leading roles, you yearn for someone to play a little hell. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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