IT'S COMPLICATED: growing older disgracefully

In a business where, the cynics like to say, the only truism is that nobody knows anything, there's one exception to this rule and her name is Meryl Streep. For the last couple of years every project she's put her name to has become a critical or box office hit or both. "Mama Mia", "Doubt", "The Fantastic Mr Fox", "Julie and Julia"and now IT'S COMPLICATED.
Her most recent release sees her invading and successfully occupying the romantic comedy territory usually reserved for younger, more conventionally attractive actresses like Meg Ryan, Amy Adams, Sandra Bullock, and Jennifer Aniston.
This is no small achievement for a youth-obsessed business which has traditionally relegated any actress over 45 to playing mothers and widows. 

As successful businesswoman Jane Adler, Streep demonstrates that age and experience are no guarantee of a straightforward and complication-free lovelife. Divorced from Jake (Alec Baldwin) for almost a decade and with three grown-up children, she discovers that she's still susceptible to Alex's roguish charms when the two spend a weekend together attending their son's graduation in New York.
Throwing caution and commonsense to the wind she plunges into an affair with her ex-husband, after he confesses that he's never stopped loving her even though he has subsequently married  the much younger woman whom he cheated on Jane with in the first place.
At the same time she finds herself being courted by Adam (Steve Martin), the warm hearted but dull architect she's commissioned to design an extension to her house. Adam, who's more recently divorced and not yet recovered from the trauma, is everything that Jake isn't. Jane suddenly finds herself spoilt for choice after a long barren spell in the dating desert. So should she go with her head or her heart?
What IT'S COMPLICATED makes clear is this is a decision that's much more complicated in practice than it is on paper, even for a woman with as much life experience as Jane. Jake is undeniably charming, persuasive and a heck of a lot of fun to be around. Adam, by comparison, is emotionally fragile, boringly low key, and looks like a waxwork of Anderson Cooper at 50.
But rather than agonize over her situation Jane exploits her new found opportunities to have some fun. This is a comedy after all, not a drama. Meryl Streep hasn't giggled this much since "Mama Mia," regaling her girlfriends with her adventures and luxuriating in the emotional high brought on by this unexpected reawakening of her lovelife.
Streep is good but she would not be half as effective if she didn't have an actor of Alec Baldwin's calibre to play against. Jake is a big cuddly bear of a man with a smile as wide as the cat who got the cream, and he's so effortlessly persuasive and appealing that we're almost prepared to forgive him for having the emotional maturity of a teenager. Even more than Streep, Baldwin deserves an Oscar nomination for his performance, but I fear that he's made it look so easy that his skill in bringing Jake to life will be overlooked by the Academy.
By no stretch of the imagination can IT'S COMPLICATED be described as a work of art. It's too fluffy and glossy for that, but perhaps it merits an Oscar nomination in the newly expanded best picture category for convincing the film industry that an audience exists beyond the coveted 18-30 age range who'll pay to watch older actors demonstrate that life and love don't have to end at 45.