Young people often take an unrealistic, or downright negative, approach to the fact that one always must take responsibility for his/her actions. Avoiding it only moves pay-up day down the road. And not realizing that it will happen, come what may, is a sure sign of arrested development.
Of course, it happens, and "Friends With Kids," while often hoping to become a comedy, provides proof.
Jennifer Westfeldt, who wrote, directed and stars, is Julie, and Adam Scott is Jason. Oh, they are great friends, but they aren't getting married, and they have good times with two married couples, Ben (Jon Hamm) and Missy (Kristen Wiig), and Alex (Chris O'Dowd) and Leslie (Maya Rudolph). Four of the six were in ":Bridesmaids," and these steps must have occurred after the wedding, or something. By the way, Hamm and Westfeld are an off-screen couple but did not want to replicate the relationship in a movie.
Anyway, Julie and Jason decide to have a baby who obviously will have all the fine and wonderful attributes that they themselves obviously possess. And they'll stay friends and date other people and share the responsibilities of rearing children.
So Julie dates Kurt (Edward Burns) and Jason dates Mary Jane (Megan Fox) and the awkward party of six turns into a nonsensical party of eight. Meanwhile, the kids who are a part of the title are left out of the rest of the movie. Westfeldt lacks the directorial experience to make all this run smoothly and, to my taste, she really hit a roadblock at the curtain line when all I could think of was the couplet from "Anything Goes," by Cole Porter, who wrote, "Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose."
Friends with Kids opens today.
—Joe