“Friends with Kids” (2012): camera as mirror

I didn’t hate this movie.

Granted, it’s hard not to feel slightly snarky about it. These people are just so well-heeled, with such glam Manhattan apartments and wardrobes and invisible jobs that seem to pay for all of it. Who hasn’t seen that before?

But that’s not my real problem. I wanted to like it more, because it’s written & directed by Jennifer Westfeldt and features the excellent co-star, Adam Scott (also: great supporting cast, lifted straight outta Bridesmaids). My real problem is with Westfeldt, who shouldn’t direct herself but in insisting on doing so, and empties the film of real feeling for her character.

Westfeldt is now so well known as the longtime partner of Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm that people have forgotten that she co-wrote and directed the pretty good film, Kissing Jessica Stein, back in 2001. Say what you will about the old-saw tropes of 1) Westfeldt as the pretty but neurotic woman and 2) the storyline in which straight girls “try out” lesbianism for a while but reassuringly return to men in the end. (Someday we will laugh so hard at the way Hollywood loved this narrative in the 90s.) It was still a pretty good film and I had hope for this 30-yr-old female director/screenwriter.

Eleven years later … well, let me just say I wanted artistic growth; instead this film feels like a sitcom. Everyone is perfectly pretty and likeable and edgy enough to meet some kind of minimum industry standard.

Adam Scott makes a nice leap from the small screen (he’s so good in the series Party Down, as well as Parks & Recreation) and the rest of the supporting cast (Maya Rudolph, Jon Hamm, Chris O’Dowd, Kristen Wiig) inhabit their roles with that effortless ease you’d expect from actors accustomed to being in front of the camera.

But then there’s Westfeldt. She feels so self-conscious, almost to the point of fading out of view. As a director she gives her co-star much more time to develop than she gives her own character. During a key point in the story — when she’s had a baby and is dieting/ exercising madly to get back into shape for dating, so she can find “the one” (I know, I know, just bear with me for a sec) — she seems to recede entirely into a placeholder. Like her character, Westfeldt seems so preoccupied with looking like she’s 29 rather than her real-life 42, so eager to dodge the humanizing and humbling close-up, that the film gets weaker all around. Is this what happens to a beautiful and talented woman whose male partner rises up to Sexiest Man Alive status?

Yet there are moments when she reveals a delicate presence onscreen that could blossom under the right director — such that as an actor I’d like to see her truly develop into a 40-something actress who feels comfortable in her own skin.

More important, if she took herself offscreen and focused on her writing and directing she could do something less self-consciously awkward and more weighty. Toward the end of the film she directs Adam Scott in a nice series of scenes toward a building passion that feels real and moving. But she doesn’t give herself the same generosity. It’s as if she can’t see herself onscreen as a character — she only sees herself in the mirror, and she’s anxious to make us believe she’s still wrinkle-free.

Jennifer Westfeldt: be your own woman, either as an actor or director. We need you to do something more than fluffy rom-coms; but if that’s your métier, you’ve got to be committed to the genre. Don’t make me write another review that begins, “I didn’t hate this movie” — because I think I really will hate the next one.

Why doesn’t Maya Rudolph have her own show?

Lady can sing and dance really well, but most of all she’s fucking hilarious. She can be Maya Angelou in a new show called I Know Why the Caged Bird Laughs in which Angelou punks her friends, like Morgan Freeman, Stephen King, and Jonathan Franzen (did I actually see that on TV?). Then she’ll turn around and be Beyoncé with all that curvacious mellifluousness such that you almost blink; or the sardonic Bronx housewife Jody Deitz, who has a gum-snapping, utterly pointless and perfect talk show with her best friend Betty Caruso (Amy Poehler). Last weekend’s Saturday Night Live was amazing, and it’s because guest host Rudolph commits to a skit like nobody’s business.

I know she’s got a supporting role in the Will Arnett/Christina Applegate comedy Up All Night (and no, I haven’t seen it) and had a background role in Bridesmaids, but really: she’d be funny reading the obituaries aloud for 30 minutes every week.

You wanna know what’s wrong with TV producers? No one has nailed Rudolph down for a sitcom of her own. Get on that, would you? And please, don’t rule out I Know Why the Caged Bird Laughs.