150 Word Review: 'Something's Gotta Give' (2003)

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Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

Writer-director Nancy Meyers punctures one of Hollywood’s laziest late 90s/early aughts genres: the aging male Baby Boomer mega-star getting it on with an actress half his age.

These days, age-gap romances are controversial, but in 2003, it was business as usual. In Something’s Got to Give, sixtysomething super bachelor Jack Nicholson ends up dating a woman his own age: the mother of his ex-girlfriend, thirty years his junior.

Nicholson plays himself, and his mugging is unbearable. Thankfully, there’s also Diane Keaton, an eternally superb actor capable of being silly, sincere, feisty, and sensitive all at once. Her every performance is a portrait of human complexity, and somehow she brings those qualities to Meyers’s ridiculous romantic comedy. There’s a montage of Keaton sobbing wildly and laughing hysterically while writing a play at her computer that redeems the whole movie. For fun, Keanu Reeves is a doctor who is also into her.

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