The thing I always think about movies like Friends With
Kids — movies in which two people who are obviously made for
each other resolutely maintain to themselves and the world that
they are just good friends until the moment of epiphany when they
discover they are totally hot for each other — is to wonder if
such stupidity really does exist in nature or if it is entirely
made up for ideological reasons. I lean toward the latter
explanation. Feminists, I think, suffer from the terminal naïveté
of always being ready to believe in the irrelevance of sex in human
relations — even relations between lustful males and the nubile
females. It’s just something they have to believe, like “the
personal is the political” or “a woman needs a man like a fish
needs a bicycle.” What they mean is that’s how it should be. They
state it in the indicative rather than the imperative in order to
pretend to themselves that what should be already is — even though
it often isn’t and sometimes never could be.
But the long-delayed romance between best friends Julie
(Jennifer Westfeldt, who also wrote and directed the picture) and
Jason (Adam Scott) is set in a movie with much larger ambitions.
This is not just a romance but an essay in the thing to which
romance was traditionally a prelude, namely family formation. If
the two things had never been separated by the sexual revolution, a
movie like this could never have been made. And for all its many
faults — about which more in a moment — it does have the very
large virtue of reintroducing the two to each other and making its
intended audience of hip urban singles — and those who aspire to
be or are nostalgic about having been among them — to think about
what still seem to some of us the natural links between romantic
love and families.
Julie and Jason are part of a “Friends”-style faux
family with two other couples. Leslie (Maya Rudolph) and Alex
(Chris O’Dowd) lead the way in having children and Missy (Kristen
Wiig) and Ben (Jon Hamm) soon follow. Eventually Julie and Jason
get the idea and decide to have a baby together and share custody
— they even move in together — with the stipulation that they are
not in love, are not a couple, are not even attracted to each other
and are still each expecting to find elsewhere the romance that has
severally eluded them. But before you protest at the
preposterousness of this scenario, you should know that the movie
is way ahead of you. When Jason finally figures things out, he
explains it to Julie: “We decided to make the kid together so we
could have the romantic part later, but this is the romantic
part, and all the rest was just filler.” Duh!
The “filler” includes Jason’s long relationship with dancer Mary
Jane (Megan Fox) and Julie’s rather less lengthy one with Kurt (Ed
Burns), about whom on meeting him she rhapsodizes: “Who knew there
were men like that?” To her he seems “a real, grown-up man” — the
implicit comparison is with Jason whose taste in women runs to the
bimbo-esque and who is described by his best friend, Julie, as “a
pig when it comes to women” — though we are not made privy to any
revisions she might be inclined to make in this opinion after their
relationship breaks up. Julie’s and Jason’s attempts to make stable
relationships apart from their shared one, consisting of a long
platonic friendship and a child, are seen in the context of the
troubled marriages of Leslie and Alex and Missy and Ben, both of
which are put under enormous strain with the arrival of their
respective offspring.
Right there you can see the trouble with this movie as a study
of families. The kids simply get in the way of what everybody still
assumes, as they did when they were single and childless, is real
life. That’s also why the kids are mere props in this movie, just
as they apparently are in the lives of its adult characters. At no
point does Miss Westfeldt allow us to see them as anything but more
or less troublesome pets. The movie actually starts from the
proposition that real life is the life of these hip Manhattan
singles, gathered around a table in a swanky restaurant and looking
rather askance at the social faux pas of their neighbors
at the next table who have brought kids into it. That’s what kids
do: they ruin your social life and maybe even your marriage.
True, the movie treats them as a kind of weary inevitability for
anyone with any street credibility and takes rather a dim view of
the one character who, in the name of her “freedom,” flatly rejects
the whole idea of reproducing. This is Jason’s slim, lithe,
large-breasted girlfriend Mary Jane who says, “I could never be
responsible for another living thing” — which also puts children
and pets into the same category. But to the others as much as to
Mary Jane, real life does not include children. Instead it consists
of dating and going out with other adults for convivial and
expensive meals, working and vacationing and, above all, “having
sex” — all things with which children can only interfere.
Especially having sex. In fact, not having sex smacks of scandal.
The friends are always interested in how often each other is able
to manage it, and the chief burden of parenthood is seen as the
limitation it places upon one’s opportunities to copulate.
One curiosity about the movie is that its natural climax comes
quite a long way before the end. The three couples, plus Jason’s
girlfriend and Julie’s boyfriend, are on a skiing vacation together
in Vermont, along with the kids — who as usual scamper about like
puppies without leaving any human impression. As they sit over
dinner together, Ben, who is depressed and drinking heavily, says
that some people were just not meant to be parents. He clearly has
himself and Missy in mind but, perhaps envious of Julie’s and
Jason’s perfect relationship, attempts to project his own misery
onto them. Jason replies with a splendid outburst in response to
Ben’s pessimism which purports to vindicate his still non-sexual
love for Julie as the perfect foundation for child-rearing. “I am
on board with everything about her,” he says and proceeds to
enumerate her many charms for him, among which is the fact that “we
both think organized religion is totally full of s***.”
The idea seems to be that, as Missy and Ben’s marriage is
obviously breaking down, they would be hard put to it to come up
with a similar catalogue of each other’s virtues and that what’s
really important in a relationship is the number of boxes such a
couple could check about each other. Likes kids, check. Likes dogs,
check. Thinks organized religion is totally full of s***, check. As
Julie and Jason are perfectly compatible in every way but (so they
are determined to think at this point) sexual attractiveness, they
must have the sort of firm foundation that the ideal family should
be built on. But instead of having them fall into each other’s arms
at this point, the movie artificially stretches out its long
charade of their supposed sexual incompatibility for another half
hour before calling time and making them realize what everybody
else has understood from the start, or certainly since the scene in
the ski lodge.
Why do that? Maybe because the coincidence of opinion implied by
their both thinking organized religion is full of s*** is being
mistaken for the sort of bond that religion itself would once have
made in order to bring about and sustain marriage and
child-bearing. The God-shaped hole in these people’s lives is being
filled, so they think, by the kind of human chemistry (or alchemy)
outlined 200 years ago by Goethe in his Elective
Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) which they have
both got to understand before they can be together. That’s
the romance that Jason is talking about in the end when he says
that “this is the romantic part.” He means that they have finally
collected enough points of congruence between them, including the
all-important sexual one, to see the pattern and so justify the
existence of the family they started on the somewhat slenderer
basis of sharing similar opinions and being parents to the same
child.
Once again, the poor kid is being devalued vis-à-vis
the paramount importance given to his parents’ tender psyches and
the imperative of their many lifestyle preferences. That’s the
reality that Miss Westfeldt’s movie cannot escape from, and Jason’s
final revelation is just a way of tacking on a sentimentally
satisfying ending to a portrayal of life utterly without romance —
a life in which sex has been mistaken for romance and will
doubtless continue to be, as we realize when Jason offers to prove
his love for the girl whom, as he now understands, he mistakenly
thought he was not attracted to. He does this by saying, “Let me
f*** the s*** out of you to show you I am into you.” That’s the big
romantic pay-off in Miss Westfeldt’s view. You can’t help but
realize that this is a movie about people who don’t really know
what romance is. They’ve heard of it, and they are keen to
experience it; they have all kinds of theories about it and where
it comes from and what it must be like. But the way they have
learned to live their lives will make it forever impossible for
them.
