Despite the fun and promising preview for It’s Complicated, it turned out to be a disappointment. It has major script problems and in my opinion almost everyone in the film is miscast. Basically, in the first third, Alec Baldwin holds the film up by doing his fiendish, Alec Baldwin thing, but after that the story just sputters, his shitck starts getting old, and the film gets downright boring.

I will never understand the universal admiration for Meryl Streep. I’ve warmed to her (a little) late in her career, mainly because she is just so cute now in these lighter roles: this, Mama Mia, Julia Childs, etc. But she is really not a very good actress. Take this film, for example. Almost every line she delivers, and every body movement she makes, contains a patented Meryl Streep tic. She is nothing but tics – she’s as bad as Julia Roberts in this regard. I swear, she has about twelve ways of delivering lines, and they are the same movie after movie after movie. Why is she considered the greatest actress of our generation? I will never understand it.

Compare her in this role to Kate Winslet who played a similar role in the last Nancy Meyer film, The Holiday. There is no simply comparison: Kate Winslet’s considerably more natural emotional range, her warmth on screen, her ability to blend with her co-stars. She blows Meryl Streep out of the water. For just one example, think about the scene in The Holiday where she is blind-sided at the holiday party in the beginning by the public announcement that the man she is in love with (Rufus Sewell) is getting married to someone else – the look on her face when Sewell sheepishly meets her eye: I’ve never seen Meryl Streep communicate so much emotion with a look. Kate Winslet is the real thing; Meryl Streep is all hype – on this, I am adamant.

Steve Martin in not an actor. I’m not sure what he is these days. He is like a line-delivering robot. His emotional range is ZERO. His vocal inflection is ZERO. He is like a piano with one note. And his range of facial expressions is ZERO, although this is partly because his plastic surgery is nearing the tipping point. His eyes look so bizarre at time I could barely stand to look at him. Watching him in scenes with Streep is kind of painful – they’re both these cold, narrow actors, and on top of it all they have no chemistry.

As for the supporting players, they are also problematic. In the all-important role of the son-in-law, John Krasinski (who has a bit part in The Holiday) just does not have the comic timing or the presence to inhabit the role effectively. The other kids are just annoying, and seem like cardboard placeholders.

As if all this is not enough, the story and the arc of the central character don’t really make sense, mostly because Steep’s character was not developed well enough to make her decisions seem plausible. And they pretty much lifted the fantastic musical themes in The Holiday and plunked them down in this film, except that they don’t work in this film.

All in all, it’s pretty much a waste of time.