Friends With Kids
In Friends With Kids, New Yorkers Jason and Julie, friends since college, react to their friends having kids by deciding to skip marriage and have a baby together, sharing custody but maintaining separate apartments and lives. A novel premise. But is it funny?
This ensemble piece stars writer and director Jennifer Westfeldt as Julie and Adam Scott as Jason. The other two couples are played by Jon Hamm (Don Draper from Mad Men) matched with Kristen Wiig of Bridemaids and Chris O’Dowd and Maya Rudolph (also of Bridesmaids fame).
Adam Scott is “terrific as a pussy hound who grows into a man of feeling,” praised Peter Travers in Rolling Stone
Bridesmaids revisited? Like Bridesmaids, Friends With Kids features jokes based on what Peter Travers described in Rolling Stone as “serial attacks of explosive diarrhea,” coming this time from the kids instead of the bridesmaids. Other female bodily functions are also mined for humour, but to Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times these quips directed primarily at women are as “limiting in their way as the football-watching, belly-scratching preoccupations of the sitcom man of yore … badges of progressiveness that often serve only to veil the retrograde themes lurking behind them.”
No sad spinsters though. Ellen E. Jones in the Guardian congratulated Westfeldt “for avoiding the sad spinster stereotype by giving equal screen time to Jason’s struggles with aging and fatherhood.”
All talk and no action? Joe Morgenstern, in the Wall Street Journal accused the script of being “afflicted by explosive verbal diarrhea.” Jeanette Catsoulis in the New York Times concurred that it was too “talky.” Joe Morgenstern, in the Wall Street Journal found it “shrill in tone, awash in unexamined narcissism” with the kids being used merely as “pretexts for laughs, rather than objects of love.”
Indelibly funny. Peter Travers, of Rolling Stone was left scarred by the experience (in a good way), finding Friends With Kids to be: “an indelibly funny and touching comedy with a real sting in its tail. The laughs leave scars.”
Just another predictable rom-com. Lisa Kennedy in the Denver Post recognised Friends With Kids as the “30-something follow-up to last year’s 20-something romantic comedies ‘Friends With Benefits’ and the lesser ‘No Strings Attached.’” For Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times Friends with Kids was “Predictable … Dawdling toward a destination visible from the outset.” Sheri Linden of the Los Angeles Times agreed that: “for all the daring of Jason and Julie’s social experiment, essentially they’re just another rom-com couple, oh so crazily complicating their path to that longed-for clinch.”
A vanity project? Ellen E. Jones in the Guardian questioned Westfeldt’s role as screenwriter, director, producer, lead actress AND longtime partner of box office draw Jon Hamm, commenting that: “the suspicion of a vanity project lingers like dirty nappy odour.” Westfeldt (“the film’s least recognisable face“) had previously written, produced and starred in Kissing Jessica Stein (2001) and Ira and Abby (2006), also rom-coms with a twist (lesbianism and psychotherapy, respectively). Jones suggested that Westfeldt capitalised on her relationship with Hamm to entice the Bridesmaids stars to join the cast.
Or exploring an issue closer to home? In the Daily Mail, Alanah Eriksen asked if there were parallels with “childless 42-year-old” Westfeldt’s own life with Hamm, 41, who she has been with for 14 years. Westfeldt recently told Ariel Kaminer in an interview for the New York Times Magazine that she “never thought I’d be this age and not have kids,” but that the “chance that we’ll regret it doesn’t seem like a compelling enough reason to do it.” Hamm has also been interrogated on the subject. He told the Hollywood Reporter: “It’s always on the periphery of the discussion, but we do not have children … it’s a tricky balance to strike.” He said that the world of acting would be a difficult environment in which to bring up a child, and while he greatly admired his friends with kids, it was “not for us just yet.”
