REVIEWED - PRIME: 'Older woman' Uma Thurman dates her psychiatrist's younger son in a stale romcom that's watchable, thanks to its female leads, writes Donald Clarke
THE film has an austere one-word title. It stars Meryl Streep and Uma Thurman. It is set in New York and encourages its smug characters to name-drop the sort of artists - John Coltrane, Mark Rothko, Michelangelo Antonioni - the appreciation of whose work, once, a lifetime ago, admitted you to the cognoscenti. In short, Prime fancies itself as something a bit classy. But take away the borrowings from Woody Allen and you're left with an utterly routine romantic comedy, the likes of which more often feature Anistons than Streeps.
It's all here. The female lead has a gay friend. The male lead has a buddy who wears his baseball cap backwards. Ten minutes before the end, the lovers break up. And so on. Something unusual does happen in the final few frames, but by then we are so tuned into a specific genre the effect is puzzling rather than refreshing.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with genre. The key high-concept in Prime is, however, so preposterous that it proves very difficult to stay on board. An aggressively Jewish psychiatrist (Streep) is delighted to hear that her patient (Thurman), a 37-year-old divorcée, has hooked up with a good-looking man some 14 years her junior. At about the same time, the shrink's son - a painter of cheesy portraits we are, presumably, supposed to admire - announces that he is dating a significantly older Gentile woman. Mom is appalled.
You can see where this is going. The opening act is bearable enough, but, when Streep, after discovering the truth, elects to continue seeing her patient, the picture begins to creak beneath the weight of its own improbability. "Is this even ethical?" she remarks to a colleague. How she persuades herself that the answer to that query might even be "maybe" is never made clear.
Streep and Thurman do manage some good work here. The older actor squirms magnificently when Thurman begins talking about her boyfriend's penis. Sadly, the male lead, somebody off the telly named Bryan Greenberg, has about as much charisma as used dental floss. "You're so funny," people keep saying to him (like Americans do). He isn't.
