page_title: It's Complicated (film)
section_title: Critical response
hierarchical_section_title: It's Complicated (film) / Reception / Critical response
caption_attribution_description: English: Alec Baldwin, Meryl Streep, Josh Wood attend 15th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards after party held at Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall, Los Angeles, California
context_page_description: It's Complicated is a 2009 American romantic comedy film written and directed by Nancy Meyers. It stars Meryl Streep as a successful bakery owner and single mother of three who starts a secret affair with her ex-husband, played by Alec Baldwin, ten years after their divorce – only to find herself drawn to another man: her architect Adam. The film also features supporting performances by Lake Bell, Hunter Parrish, Zoe Kazan, John Krasinski, Mary Kay Place, Robert Curtis Brown and Rita Wilson, among others.
  The film was met with average reviews from critics, who praised the acting of its ensemble cast but declared its story rather predictable. It became another commercial hit for Meyers, however, upon its Christmas Day 2009 opening release in the United States and Canada. It played well through the holidays and in to January 2010, ultimately closing on April 1 with $112.7 million. Worldwide, It's Complicated eventually grossed $219.1 million, and surpassed The Holiday to become Meyer's third-highest-grossing project to date.
  For their performances, the cast was awarded a National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Award for Best Ensemble Cast the same year.
context_section_description: It's Complicated received mixed reviews from film critics. As of June 2020, the film holds a 58% approval rating on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 181 reviews with an average rating of 5.8/10. The website's critical consensus is: "Despite fine work by an appealing cast, It's Complicated is predictable romantic comedy fare, going for broad laughs instead of subtlety and nuance." Another review aggregator, Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average, gave the film a score of 57 out of 100, based on 30 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
  Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe called the film "the most emotionally sophisticated of all Meyers’s fantasies" and praised the acting performances in it. He noted that the film felt like "a made-for-Meryl film [in which] Streep deploys all her best moves [...] in movie star mode, and she’s irresistible," and declared Baldwin a worthy match to her, writing: "It’s Complicated unleashes an unabashedly, desperately romantic side of Baldwin that we haven’t seen before. He doesn’t steal this movie so much as grant all Streep’s fluttering and twirling and hand-fanning an exuberant counterweight." In his review for the Washington Post, Michael O'Sullivan called the film a "very grown-up – and very funny – love story [which] manages to be both light on its feet and heavy enough to deliver something of a message." He concluded: "Food Network porn, hot, middle-age sex and a happy, if slightly bittersweet, ending. For a particular audience – but not just for that audience – what's not to love?" Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called the film an "unapologetic chick flick" and wrote that "you don't have to feel guilty for lapping up this froth. Just don't expect nourishment." He rated the film two and a half stars out of four.
  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times also gave it two and a half stars and called the film a prime example of Meyer's established "cottage industry of movies about romantically inclined middle-aged people." He found praise for the cast of both Baldwin and Streep, the latter of which he felt "inspires as so often our belief that she's good at everything she does," but noted that while the film contained "funny stuff" and likeable characters, It's Complicated was more of "a rearrangement of the goods in Nancy Meyers' bakery, and some of them belong on the day-old shelf." Writing for Time magazine, Mary Pols complimented Streep's "radiant, funny and endearingly vulnerable" performance and Meyers' "clever and fresh [...] intent in showing the reality of the fantasy coming true." She, however, felt that It's Complicated "is positioned more as a which-guy-will-she-choose story" which misses "dramatic tension to feed that plot line."
  Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a B- rating and declared the film a "middle-aged porn, the specialty of Meyers, who also set ladies and interior decorators drooling over homes and gardens in 2006's The Holiday." Lou Lumenick from New York Post stated that it "coulda had more laughs, but in the spirit of seasonal good cheer, let me predict that the best-chocolate-croissant-making montage in Hollywood history is going to help this one clean up at the box office." He found that Martin seemed "uncomfortable in his thankless role," while "Streep and Baldwin, though, seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves" and compared the film to Noël Coward's classic farce Private Lives. Salon.com writer Stephanie Zacharek dismissed the film as "another missive from romantic-comedy hell," and felt that "Alec Baldwin -- in his undershorts, no less -- saves Nancy Meyers' latest midlife whingefest."
caption: Baldwin and Streep received generally positive reviews from critics for their performances in It's Complicated.[20]
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