The Switch

Directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon. Starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, Patrick Wilson, Jeff Goldblum, Juliette Lewis, Thomas Robinson 15A cert, gen release, 101 min

ARGH! IT’S A Jennifer Aniston movie. Your former Friend is a gifted comic actor, but her determination to seek out the most pallid scripts has, in recent years, caused her to take on the status of an alert klaxon. Beware! Here be garbage! Stand down the escape pod.

The Switchturns out to be more of a Jason Bateman film than an Aniston vehicle. Based on a story by Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex, this surprisingly sweet picture finds Jennifer playing Kassie, an urban singleton who, as 40 approaches, determines to get her eggs fertilised by any means necessary. After a rummage about the internet, Kassie happens upon a man with the right sort of fluid.

Good choice. This character played by Patrick Wilson – rock-climber, family man, eagle impersonator – is the class of person Leni Riefenstahl used to make films about. Only Kassie’s loyal best pal Wally seems uneasy about the situation.

One of Bateman’s trademark likable neurotics, Wally drinks himself insensible at the (ahem) insemination party and, after accidentally spilling the “sample”, surreptitiously replaces it with his own emissions. Seven years later, Kassie returns to New York with a son (Thomas Robinson) who looks more like a twitchy Bateman than a statuesque Wilson.

The Switchdoes have something of a split personality. Though much of it plays like a regulation if above-average romcom, little strains of Eugenides's post-modern sensibility (the boy has a taste for the sample photos issued with picture frames) occasionally nudge the film into less conventional territory. Happily, the beautifully played relationship between Bateman and Robinson holds it all together quite nicely. Echoing each other's jerks and jolts with elegant symmetry, the two guys make a rather touching case for the binding powers of shared neuroses.

Add in Jeff Goldblum as Wally’s (really?) eccentric boss and Juliette Lewis as Kassie’s (get out of here) annoyingly kooky friend and you’ve got a decent little ensemble piece. Anistonphobes have nothing to fear here.