Prime (2005): Dir: Ben Younger / Cast: Meryl Streep, Uma Thurman, Bryan Greenberg, Jon Abrahams, Annie Parisse: Romantic comedy about relationships and timing. It could have been much better since the concept has potential. Meryl Streep plays a therapist who learns that a 37 year-old female divorcée is now dating her 23 year-old son. This sets the stage for some hilarious moments that boil down to sitcom settings and situations with a third act that doesn't come together as well as it should. Director Ben Younger does well with the material. This is certainly a different path from his previous film Boiler Room. Streep's comic performance steals the film especially since she knows what the key players do not. Uma Thurman plays the divorcée while Bryan Greenberg plays Streep's son and both roles are by the numbers boring. Thurman at least gets to unintentionally dish out the goods during therapy sessions with Streep, but Greenberg never goes beyond the surface, and contains all the personality of a fence post. Jon Abrahams as the best friend who throws pies in the faces of girlfriends is underused, and his subplot might have made a much better movie on its own. Instead we are left with a dreary sitcom. Themes regard family, relationships and the flaws to overcome in order to survive them. Unfortunate the film is done in with its obvious sitcom delivery. Score: 5 / 10

"Prime" from 2005 is a sweet film starring Meryl Streep, Uma Thurman, and Bryan Greenberg. Uma plays Rafi, a 37-year-old woman who is recently divorced and hashing her misery out with her therapist, Lisa Metzger (Streep). She's thrilled when a week after her divorce, she meets an attractive younger man, 23-year-old David (Greenberg). The two flip out over one another. What she doesn't know is that David is her therapist's son, and she wants him to marry someone Jewish. When Lisa finds out, problems arise.This is a light, not uproariously funny comedy, with good performances and New York City locations. Religion isn't the only issue; there's the 14-year age difference, David's relationship with his mother, his mother's quandary about continuing to work with Rafi, and Rafi's desire to have a child. As one friend puts it, she's "on the clock." All of which are handled very well and not in a heavy duty way.I wish there were more films that dealt with older women and younger men. We usually see outrageously older men and younger women, and it's not an issue in the movie! Meryl Streep does a good job as a matronly Jewish mother; she has some funny scenes. Bryan Greenberg is very good as an aspiring artist still finding his way. But for me, it's Uma Thurman's film. I can't see her without recalling that when I lived in New York, I saw her then-husband, Ethan Hawke, all the time with their baby. She's luminous, she's gorgeous, and her acting is marvelous as her character goes through the misery of divorce and the glory of new love, evolving all through the film. She's wonderful.This is a good rental, very enjoyable.

I realize this was a movie, but the idea that a counselor would continue to see a patient who was in a relationship with her son is so unethical I could not enjoy what few pleasures there were in this movie.I reduced my rating when I considered the "ick factor" of a mother discussing her son's penis with his lover.The best thing about the movie was the song at the end, "I Wish You Love," by Rachel Yamagata.SPOILER ALERT I will say I did appreciate the movie's refusal to go with the love conquers all ending. I don't like sad movies, but why no one makes movies with that exquisite pain of lost love like "The Way We Were."

Hollywood is quite comfortable with the idea of romances between older men and younger women, probably because the average studio executive is an ageing man with the financial muscle to pull a glamorous young trophy wife. We can all think of innumerable films in which a beautiful young starlet is cast as the love interest of a man old enough to be her father (or, in some cases, grandfather). Hollywood, on the other hand, is decidedly uncomfortable with the idea of romances between older women and younger men, generally treating such romances as bizarre and anomalous. The best-known film on this theme is "The Graduate", and even there Benjamin ends up not with Mrs Robinson but with her daughter."Prime" is, in all respects but one, a romantic comedy. The normal mathematical formula for a rom-com is A+B-C=D, where A represents "boy loves girl", B represents "girl loves boy" and C represents some obstacle to their love which needs to be removed in order to achieve happy ending D. The lovers in this case are Rafi (it's short for Raphaelle), a recently divorced Manhattan career woman, and David, a talented painter. There are two potential obstacles to their love, a difference in religion (he is Jewish, she a Gentile) and a difference in age (he is 23, she 37).The main plot device in the film is that Rafi shares all her secrets, including her relationship with David, with her psychotherapist Lisa, who (quite unknown to Rafi) just happens to be David's mother. Lisa seems to be the sort of laid-back therapist who, rather than subjecting her patients to deep Freudian analysis, simply advises them to do whatever they feel happiest doing, and encourages Rafi to continue with her affair, even when she discovers that Rafi's lover is in fact her own son. (The ethical dilemmas posed by this arrangement are rather glossed over). Lisa is less happy, however, when she realises that her son's relationship is serious and not (as she had initially assumed) a mere fling.Although Meryl Streep can be very good in comedy, she is surprisingly weak in this film. (She was to be much better in "The Devil Wears Pravda", another comedy set in New York, the following year). The scenes between Lisa and Rafi seem less like a psychotherapy sessions than like cosy chats between two friends, and in her scenes with David Lisa comes uncomfortably close to the stereotype of the neurotic, over-protective Jewish mother. Uma Thurman and Bryan Greenberg are rather better as the two lovers, although I never got any real sense of the supposed age gap between them, even though this is an important plot point. In 2005 Greenberg was 27 and Thurman a young-looking 35. Although Sandra Bullock, the film-makers' original choice for the role of Rafi, has never been my favourite actress, she might have been more convincing as the older woman. (She would have been 41 in 2005, fourteen years older than Greenberg as opposed to Thurman's eight).Of the two obstacles mentioned above, one (the difference in religion) can be overcome. "Gentile" does not always equal "Christian", and Rafi, who has been brought up without any religious faith, is quite happy to convert to Judaism. The difference in age, however, is another matter. In the world inhabited by Hollywood scriptwriters the 14-year age difference between a 23-year-old woman and a 37- year-old man (or, for that matter, between a 37-year-old woman and a 51-year-old man) would not be an issue at all. When, however, we are dealing with a 37-year-old woman and a 23-year-old man, the same age gap becomes an insuperable obstacle.This is why I described the film as a romantic comedy in all respects but one; it lacks the traditional happy ending. After various ups and downs, Rafi breaks with David, although this is presented less as a heartless rejection than as a noble sacrifice on her part. The assumption seems to be that Rafi knows better than David himself where his true interests lie, that no man in his early twenties really wants to become a husband and father, and that by rejecting him she sacrifices her own happiness to save him from this terrible fate.I must say that I did not like the ending at all. The film has been described as an exploration of the possibility that love is not enough to make a relationship work, but it never really answers the question of what else might be needed. There is no real reason why the relationship between Rafi and David could not have worked; her rejection of him struck me as being both patronising and unconsciously cruel. By following the normal conventions of the romantic comedy the film leads the viewer to expect the standard happy ending for, and then suddenly substitutes an unhappy one, and does so, I think, in order to make a thoroughly reactionary point along the lines of "stick with your own kind", or "don't defy convention". There is always something depressing about a film which preaches a sermon in praise of conformity or conventionality. 5/10