Friends with Kids (2012)

The greatest crime committed by the disappointing and irritating new comedy Friends with Kids is that it takes a winning, surefire cast and strands them in thankless roles that don’t play to their strengths. On paper, this ensemble couldn’t look more promising. Kristen Wiig, Jon Hamm, Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd all reunite after starring in last year’s very funny Bridesmaids, and the two new cast members—writer/director Jennifer Westfeldt and Adam Scott of Party Down and Parks and Recreation—further stack the cards in this movie’s favor. What’s the problem, then? It’s not the Westfeldt that we see onscreen, but the Westfeldt that wrote and directed this movie. Instead of making her characters engaging and fun to hang out with, she gives the film an unnecessary mean streak and never earns the backlash-inducing shifts in tone between Apatovian R-rated comedy and serious relationship drama. Worse yet, it never makes a compelling argument for its overarching point of view.

The film revolves around the relationship between Jason (Scott) and Julie (Westfeldt), who are two single friends who hang out with two married couples: Missy (Wiig) and Ben (Hamm), and Leslie (Rudolph) and Alex (O’Dowd). When these couples start to have kids, Jason and Julie notice that they suddenly become cartoonishly unpleasant people. They never want to hang out anymore, and they are always screaming and cursing at each other. Jason and Julie discuss these strange happenings and decide that if they want to have a kid, they should just do it now as friends. That way, they don’t need to worry about all the baggage that comes with marriage and they can focus exclusively on the child. That’s exactly what happens. They sleep together once, have the child, raise it, and after a while go out on their own to date others. (Julie hooks up with Edward Burns and Jason with Megan Fox, and both of these characters are far more inviting than the central group of friends.) Will Jason and Julie eventually learn that maybe there’s more to their relationship than mere friendship? That’s one question that may never be answered.

Friends with Kids has a great first scene, as Jason and Julie call each other in the middle of the night and have a brief discussion about their current romantic lives and all that. It’s a real, very funny moment, but it turns out to be the only such scene in the movie. Once the plot kicks in, everything feels utterly controlled by Westfeldt the screenwriter and director. The long conversations between Jason and Julie leading up to the decision to have a baby together aren’t that convincing, and it would have been more accurate for one of them to say “we need to have a baby because the screenplay tells us to.” It’s not that the premise is inherently bad, but Westfeldt never earns it. There’s a feeling throughout that when she sat down to write this movie, she knew what she wanted to say and she was going to say it no matter what. She just filled in the characters, gave them some dialogue, and maybe let the talented actors improvise a little bit on set. Westfeldt deals mostly in absolutes, and there’s little room for differing opinions.

The characters in this film are so rigidly controlled that the use of much of the Bridesmaids acting troupe feels like a waste of resources. We don’t spend a lot of time with them—specifically the Hamm and Wiig pairing—and when we do they really aren’t all that funny. This is even truer later on, when a few of the characters get into a shouting match around a dinner table. The acting in this scene is tremendous, but just like the rest of the movie it feels completely invalid. This is a great cast all around, and they all do really fine work given the circumstances, but it’s all based on a conceit so synthetic that the important moments never resonate. Friends with Kids is a movie about how married couples with kids are pretty much the worst, and it wants to explore how an alternative method of raising a child might work. The outcome just feels so predetermined that the film doesn’t do nearly enough of the “exploring” part.

Westfeldt hijacks herself further by deciding to go into full romantic comedy mode late in the movie, and the clichéd ending takes an already flimsy movie and makes it feel even more so. I was already put off by Friends with Kids, but I was ready to give it points for at least taking some chances with the romantic comedy genre. Instead, it coasts in for the easy landing. Trust me, this was a movie I was trying very hard to like. The entire cast—Westfeldt included—is fantastic, and in general this is the kind of movie that I try to support. Yet nothing clicked with me; not the plot, not the humor, and not the brief moments of irritatingly pontifical drama. Friends with Kids wants so badly to find truths about relationships, marriage and having children, but when all is said and done it is only interested in Westfeldt’s truth.

Grade: D+