The appeal of Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, two charismatic actors, is lost for much of a film that is flawed at its most basic level. Structurally, Just Go With It is cynical, nasty and misogynistic. There is no excuse in a post-Nick Hornby /Judd Apatow landscape for a film that relegates an entire gender to a plot device. Its lack of acknowledgment or even critique is (unintentionally, I suppose) crueler than In The Company of Men.
Consider Danny (Sandler), a plastic surgeon. I rarely find comedies with plastic surgeons enjoyable – at their core they are portrayed as sleazy “artists” interested in enhancing. Sure, Danny does some pro-bono work on children, but we see the horror stories as well, including a women who accidentally slammed her unhealthily enlarged boob in a car door. Danny ran away on his wedding day from a women who cheated on him with his cousin, played by Nick Swardson (The Benchwarmers, Blades of Glory, Reno 911!: Miami).
He moves from Long Island to Los Angeles, shifts his focus to Cardiology, gets a nose reduction and discovers the power of the wedding ring. He spends the next 20 years bedding women by spinning narratives about fake years of emotional abuse from fake wives. Then enters Palmer, played by a swimsuit model with a relatively light acting career: Brooklyn Decker. It’s unfortunate she’s merely eye candy here. And this is a problem : the courtship is brief, meaningless and unrealistic for anyone above 12. The level of maturity on screen matches that of Max Keeble’s Big Move – that film was about seventh graders.
After the courtship – which involves a long walk on a beach – they spend the night together. She discovers Danny’s faux-wedding ring and all hell doesn’t break loose. Danny enlists his assistant, Katherine (Aniston), to keep up the farce. In a particularly odd scene, Katherine, “playing” Danny’s soon-to-be ex, has drinks with Danny and Palmer. Why? Because the plot requires it, despite the fact that no one in human history has ever done this. Then comes a call from Katherine’s kids. Now these poor children, who rarely spend anytime with their father, are dragged into the farce.
The film falls apart if any of the characters simply explained themselves to one another. How can a man really keep up a “lie” to the love his life? How can she accept all this baggage? Why is a man in his 40s pursuing a 23-year old? Why does she go for it?Does she perhaps have “daddy” issues? She loves kids and love men that love kids – can’t she see through this? The problem is she is nothing more than a bubbly swimsuit model, a setback for at least 80 years of strong women on the silver screen.
Paradoxically, Decker’s presence shows promise. Here is a competent performance that hopefully will lead to a career beyond dreck like this or direct-to-video comedies co-starring Carmen Electra. The problem is the structure of the film gives her little to do; she’s a prop, pointing out to Danny that he’s rushing into the relationship.
And what a thin, boring relationship this is. Any woman should run away – perhaps Palmer has darker intentions, but she likes “children” and she is but a schoolteacher so we’ll never hear about it. We know so little about her mostly because the film’s screenwriters (Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling) did not feel the need to tell us, nor did they feel the need to fully develop what we believe is the “love” interest of the film.
There have been films dealing with deception and “fake families” that find a middle ground. This is not Adam Sandler’s About a Boy – it should and could’ve been more like that film and book – instead lacking the emotional honesty from which comedy is derived. Perhaps this is too heavy and we should take the suggestion of its title. The problem is the last 20 minutes actually start to work, despite the total manipulation and insult to maybe half the audience, who on the suggestion of the title are in a passive state. Good for them, it must be nice.
When Michael, Katherine’s son, suggests in front of Palmer that his dad promised to take him to Hawaii, they go with little thought, all on Danny’s MasterCard. I would like to believe this move is about more than sex from a swimsuit model. I might’ve bought Ashlee Dupree dinner, but I certainly wouldn’t have paid $9,000 an hour for the privilege – there are cheaper options for sex. The McGuffin at the heart of the film is someone Danny wants to own for the rest of his life. This is a far creepier agenda than even Eliot Spitzer’s motivation.
And it’s about this point where I can’t Just Go With It. In an honest film there would have been more courtship – we’d see what’s at the core of Danny and Palmer’s relationship. About A Boy achieved this successfully in voice over. Consider the scene where Hugh Grant and Rachel Weisz meet for the first time and talk at a dinner party with Badly Drawn Boy’s wonderful score wooing us in the background. No level of honesty exists here, just a string of jokes, which are largely misses, but a few land successfully.
There’s also another spirited performance in Hawaii: Nicole Kidman and Dave Matthews appear as Katherine’s rival and her perfect new-age husband. The humor present never transcends past the surface, it’s divorced from the larger picture and the film’s deadly structure, despite having the atmosphere of a French farce, and it lacks the restraint to hold back for big comic payoffs.
Just Go With It is largely a structural train-wreck with a complicated, shall we say “provenance.” Quoting directly from Wikipedia: “The film is based on the 1969 film Cactus Flower, which was adapted from an earlier Broadway stage play, written by Abe Burrows, which in turn was based on the French play Fleur de Cactus.” Perhaps the French, or even Bollywood will remake this, and I only see room for improvement.
