Harry's Movie Review

It's Complicated asks what happens when a divorced couple reconnect after ten years, and whether second chances can look like something other than what we expect. The premise is solid. Meryl Streep's Jane is a woman who thought she had moved on, built a new life, started a romance with her architect. Then her ex-husband Jake shows up at their son's college graduation and complicates everything. The film knows this is messy. It doesn't apologize for that.

Streep does something quiet here. She doesn't perform the confusion or the longing. You watch it happen in her face, in the way she hesitates before saying yes to a drink, in how her body language changes when Jake enters a room. Alec Baldwin matches her energy instead of overplaying, which matters. Steve Martin as the architect could have been a prop, but he brings something genuine to a man who deserves better than he gets. The ensemble respects each other's space on screen, and that creates room for real comedy to breathe.

Nancy Meyers directs this with a light touch, letting scenes sit without forcing laughs. The pacing runs two hours, which occasionally feels long when the script reaches for sentiment instead of finding it. There's a scene or two that wobbles when it should land. But Meyers understands that this is a story about people figuring things out in real time, not a story with predetermined answers, and that approach carries you through the softer moments.

I kept thinking about how the film refuses to make Jane choose quickly or dramatically. She sits with her confusion. She makes mistakes. She doesn't have a speech where everything becomes clear. By the end, what stayed with me was not some big romantic resolution but the smaller realization that sometimes you need to live through the complications to understand what you actually want.