A lot of people will go to In the Land of Women, as I did, expecting it to be a romantic comedy. But it keeps teasingly sticking out its tongue to us and saying, "No, I'm not. No, I'm not.
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Romantic? Well, it's largely about a heartbroken 26-year-old guy's deep, meaningful friendships with two women. And by the time it's all over, he will have kissed both of them.
But there's a high ickiness factor to any love affair that would break out here. To start with, the females are mother and daughter. One level ickier, one is married and almost twice as old as our hero, while the other is 16 and "jail bait.
" No, the deep friendships thankfully remain just that -- deep, platonic, cross-gender friendships.
Well, we repeatedly come across things that are amusing and a little wacky. But it never quite opens up and turns into a full-blown ha-ha-ha comedy as we expect. Its humor stays low-key and offbeat, of the sort that would feel more at home in an art house theater than in general release like this one is.
What exactly is ITLOW , then? According to the one person in the world who should know best, director-writer Jonathan Kasdan, "This movie is really about a guy who's in the process of falling in love with his own life."
If you go in willing to settle for pleasantness instead of either laugh-out-loud hilarity or growing passion, you'll find a basically nice guy acting almost like a counselor, helping other people to face such unpleasant but realistic problems as cancer, old age and, most unpleasant of all, mother-daughter relations.
The guy who begins not so fond of his life is a 26-year-old named Carter Webb, played by Adam Brody from The O.C. Carter's engaged to a supermodel (Elena Anaya), who seems to be everything he ever dreamed of.
He makes his living writing scripts for softcore porn films and explaining to actresses in them what their motivation is for wanting to have sex with so and so; the main motivation is that they're in a softcore porn film and that's what characters in a softcore porn film do.
Then the model dumps him and starts hanging around with Colin Farrell. So Carter decides to move in with his semisenile granny (Olympia Dukakis) in Michigan and try to write the great high-school-angst novel he's always been anxious to do.
The old lady is blunt and mentally foggy, but not nearly as colorful or interesting as, say, any of the characters on TV's Golden Girls . Carter turns most of his attention toward the three females of the Hardwicke family who live across the street. Perfectionist, jogging housewife
Sarah is played by the delicious Meg Ryan, finally back in all-girl-and-natural-looking mode after her bizarre attempts at plastic surgery and playing a boxer.
Sarah has discovered she might have breast cancer and her husband definitely has another woman on the side. Teenage Lucy (Kristen Stewart) likes the wrong kind of boys and hates her mom for no particular reason besides the fact that she's a teenage girl and her mom is her mom. And 11-year-old Paige (Mackenzie Vega) is comically precocious.
The whole thing is full of mature talk about real interpersonal issues plus some fun. But the going-home-in-your-20s idea reminded me of how much funnier and quirkier Zach Braff's 2004 story Garden State was. And the way young Kasdan pleasantly but obtrusively lines the whole thing with near-constant pop songs reminded me of a monumentally more eloquent and meaningful and just-generally-satisfying comedy-drama done by Kasdan's famous father Lawrence called The Big Chill .
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