More Sugar With Your Ending?

Have you seen Nancy Meyers’s Somethings Gotta Give? It’s a decent enough little romantic film, certainly an improvement over her last one, What Women Want, where Mel Gibson got to prance around in stockings and listen to women’s thoughts before he moved on to his good works and made his snuf film for the faithful.

What was nice about the film was seeing Diane Keaton acting her ass off. She’s superbly multifarious. She’s loopy, sexy, wary, bitter, hopeful, sad, haunted- there’s even a scene where she encompasses all of this in a matter of seconds and it practically knocks the wind out of you. And she looks fantastic. She and Nicholson spar with loose aplomb and they’re amusing as hell to watch together. And not surprisingly, they take even the daftest of Meyers dialogue, polish it, and offer something that sparkles. It’s the gift of supremely talented actors- the intuitive alchemy of turning shit into gold.

But what I would have given had the movie ended with Nicholson’s Harry on the Pont-Neuf just after his run in with Keaton and her younger man (a muted Keanu Reeves) saying, “Look who gets to be the girl.” Oh, if the only the screen had faded out and that tidal wave of high fructose hadn’t arrived so perfectly on cue. Oh, well.