Zest Defense

Jack supporter: Amanda Peet carries Nicholson's spear.

A light touch and strong supporting players add zing to Something's Gotta Give.

by Cindy Fuchs

Someday, Amanda Peet will find a great role in a great film. Until then, she’s showing her range, from formula comedy (The Whole Nine Yards, Saving Silverman) to quirky independent drama (Igby Goes Down) to head-case thriller (Identity), and now, a "romantic comedy for adults," Something’s Gotta Give. While each performance is its own little surprise, Peet’s work as Marin, supporting player for her mother’s romance, is especially sharp. Give this girl a real movie.

An auctioneer at Christie's, Marin starts dating a customer, superwealthy record-label executive and renowned young ladies' man Harry (Jack Nicholson). When she brings him to her family's Hamptons beach house, they run into obstacles. First, her mother, playwright Erica (Diane Keaton), and Aunt Zoe (Frances McDormand), note his unsuitability as Marin's partner. And second, after a dinner punctuated by women's studies professor Zoe's zingy treatise on sexism in romance, Harry suffers a mid-woo heart attack.

The latter event triggers three important developments: no sex between Marin and Harry (so his ensuing tryst with her mother won't seem so yucky); 63-year-old Harry's self-evaluation; and Erica's assignment to nursing duties, as the patient can't be moved back to the city. Their evolving age-appropriate relationship reveals to Erica the pain of the love she writes about in her plays. It also introduces Harry to the heretofore alien concepts of commitment, maturity and equality, not to mention jealousy, as Erica is simultaneously courted by his doctor, Julian (Keanu Reeves).

While the formulaic romance is surely burdened by its predictability, it is also buoyed by Keaton and Nicholson's faultless, frankly delightful performances. Even the goopy stuff (heavy-handed jokes about his blood pressure, her weeping bouts when he inevitably acts out) is tolerable as handled by these light-touch pros. It's helpful as well that Nancy Meyers' script grants all players, save Reeves, bits of witty dialogue and/or aching insights: Marin marvels at Harry's "genius" when she tries to break up with him and he turns it into dumping her; Erica deprecates his corny self-image (he likes to "travel light"), then finds herself behaving like a Kaufman and Hart character; and Harry must face a daunting metaphor for his recovered sexual potency -- according to Julian, he must be able to climb a staircase on the beach that looms as if to the sky.

More surprising, however, are the smaller bits by supporting players, including Rachel Ticotin's no-nonsense performance as Harry's Manhattan ER doctor, and Paul Michael Glaser as Erica's director and ex-husband. He's also Marin's father, and inspires her most elaborately emotional and yet self-conscious moments, when she learns of his impending remarriage to a woman only two years her senior.

Startled and somewhat scared by what her blubbery reaction suggests about her daddy issues, her own initial attraction to Harry and her lack of poise and strength as compared to Erica (who takes the news in something resembling "stride"), Marin cries, rages, self-reflects and pulls herself together, nearly simultaneously. This brief scene, acted with and for the sublime Keaton, reveals again Peet's range, delicacy and, indeed, her Keaton-like brilliance.

Something’s Gotta Give

Written and directed by Nancy Meyers A Sony release Opens Friday at area theaters.

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