Un pequeño cambio

The Switch (2010)

Okay, it would be easy to dis this movie as a canned, obvious, emotionally thin contrivance. It's a vehicle for two popular stars playing characters in their 30s who are, despite good looks and basic social skills, single and childless. They have to fall in love but life gets in the way in kind of stupid ways. You can't take it seriously, and you can't even quite care enough to hope for the best, whatever that is.

But it's also easy to like this movie despite its obviousness. Jason Bateman is a joy to watch. Maybe his performance is like the movie--glib and facile. But like the movie he is endlessly watchable, and his character is the one with the most depth. His interactions with the boy of six or so are terrific. The boy, too, is adorable and helps the movie get some feeling.

Jennifer Aniston plays the woman who wants a child but has no one willing to be the dad, more or less (though the viewer knows better). And she's a terrific actress, actually, even if her role here (and elsewhere) is often not as demanding as it could be. I suppose Meg Ryan has some kind of edge on her for this kind of stereotype--the lovable lonely urban girl who just can't get love right despite the obvious--but Aniston is an update on that type.

But it is Aniston and Bateman together that really make the movie glide along and make you smile. They have great rapport and good timing, comedic and serious both. I wouldn't say they have chemistry (I guess that's the problem their characters have, so maybe it's great acting) but they make their scenes pop in a way the rest of the movie trundles.

The story writer, Jeffrey Eugenides, is better known for sprawling novels and lots of interrelated characters, but even there there are little hooks that come off a hair obvious. That's the problem here, in the end. There's a big trick, a wonderful and funny hook of an idea, and that almost alone has to handle all the consequences. Some better character development would have been a joy.

Oh, and it's been a long time since a movie with two directors has been able to pull off consistency. I don't know the logistics behind it, but maybe one of the hesitations all along is a lack of singular conviction. Or not. Maybe this is such a formula product any number of directors could have chipped in.

Watch it for the two leads together. And for some fun, warm laughs, if that's your thing. I enjoyed it.

well, I rented this film only because it was the only one that I hadn't see from redbox. I usually do not like Jennifer Aniston in anything but the TV show Friends, and quite honestly she wasn't great but she certainly did not 'sneeze on the buffet'. It was Jason Bateman that really carried this film. He's a very under-rated actor. The film is about friend of the opposite sex, with one, the male of course, having more feelings than the other. When he finds out that she wants to have a baby and is looking for the perfect man for his sperm, he's hurt cause she didn't pick him. The film really explores parenthood in the modern age and also dynamics of friends, and even fatherhood. It's a comedy, but it has many dramatic and poignant elements to it. I'd recommend it.

If the Hollywood studios still made the type of urban comedies they made back in the early 1970's starring George Segal (usually) as a neurotic nebbish, then Jason Bateman's big-screen career would certainly be secure. As he displayed consistently on "Arrested Development", the actor's dry delivery and slyly observant manner are a perfect match for Wally Mars, the comically cynical equities analyst he plays in this sadly overlooked 2010 romantic comedy co-directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon (who much to my surprise, helmed the Will Ferrell figure-skating comedy, "Blades of Glory"). Although he is the true protagonist of the story, the movie was marketed as a Jennifer Aniston vehicle. She plays rising TV producer Kassie Larson, his long-ago girlfriend who has relegated him to the "friend zone" even though he obviously hasn't gotten over her.

Written with verve by Allen Loeb (who also co-wrote Aniston's recent 2011 movie, the Adam Sandler starrer, "Just Go With It"), the story revolves around Kassie's ticking biological clock. In a seven-years-back flashback, she is seen deliberately bypassing Wally as a possible sperm donor in favor of a more predictable candidate, Roland, a struggling associate professor at Columbia, who happens to be married and drop-dead handsome. At an "insemination" party, Wally gets wasted and drops the carelessly placed vial of Roland's semen down the bathroom sink. This leaves Wally no choice but to replace the sample himself. Kassie eventually becomes pregnant and moves back home to Minnesota. Flash forward to the present, and Kassie returns to Manhattan with her six-year-old son Sebastian in tow. The fact that Sebastian acts like a miniature version of Wally gets completely past Kassie but not Wally who slowly realizes that out of his stupor years ago, his son was conceived.

Although this indiscretion would seem like the perfect excuse for Wally to reveal his true feelings for Kassie, complications ensue when she starts a relationship with Roland, now desperately on the rebound from a bitter divorce. At the same time, Wally forms a close bond with Sebastian who naturally gravitates toward him because of their mutual idiosyncrasies. Bateman handles Wally's evolution from self-absorbed fatalist to paternal protector with aplomb and surprising depth. Aniston is better served here than in most of her standard-issue romantic comedies, and the sharp interplay between these two actors, especially in the beginning scenes, is refreshingly rapid-fire like a modern-day "His Girl Friday". With his constantly forlorn expression interrupted by moments of genuine happiness, Thomas Robinson is terrifically understated as Sebastian, and his unforced scenes with Bateman represent the true high points of the film.

A crack supporting cast has been assembled. As Wally's best friend and manager, the sarcastic ladies' man Leonard, Jeff Goldblum takes a predictable role and gives it his special, off-kilter twist. The result is his funniest turn in years, for example, his use of the term "ill-advised" during the moment of revelation is hilariously unexpected. The same can also be said for Juliette Lewis, who plays Kassie's constantly inappropriate best friend Debbie with her spacey delivery intact as she slings clever putdowns at Wally. Even Patrick Wilson, saddled with the no-win role of the golden boy Roland, who has no capacity for honest introspection, is funny in a role that gets diabolically transparent as the proceedings get complicated. The 2011 DVD/Blu-Ray offers a standard set of extras - a fifteen-minute making-of featurette ("The Switch Conceived"); about ten deleted and alternate scenes running for nearly half an hour in total, one a more purposeful variation on the central scene; and a brief blooper reel. Give it a try.

"The Switch" is like a romantic comedy, except better because it gives you everything you want: romance and comedy with a story and characters. They buck the trend to make the romantic elements absurd and instead shower us with comedy and very little sap.

Jennifer Aniston is just a cute girl that the audience can accept as a character, but Jason Bateman is everything you want in a leading man. Very good looking but not in a typical way, plays up neurotic with aplomb, and is hilarious all the way through. We easily fall in love with him from beginning to end.

"The Switch" actually gives us a story, one where our hero has to evolve and mature as he realizes and understands the value that Aniston and her son bring to his life. Again, Jason Bateman is the kind of man that we have been waiting for in romantic comedies, because he actually has the talent to portray all of that, and do it with comedy. A romantic comedy that is cute, funny, romantic, mature and where you actually welcome the story line - what more could you ask for?

The Switch's first thirty minutes remind me of screwball comedies with repartee sharp, fast, and witty: unmarried Kassie (Jennifer Aniston) announces to her best friend, Wally (Jason Bateman), that she is going to arrange for a donor to have a baby. I know—we've been there this year with Back-up Plan and The Kids are All Right, yet there's plenty of room for all kinds of donations.

Bateman is at his under-acting, low key, gentle best responding to Aniston's usually cute bemusement because, as you might have guessed, he loves her but has not the daring to tell her. Then, at the donor party, he gets excited in the bathroom at a picture of Diane Sawyer and switches his sperm for the donor's.

You've seen similar romantic comedy setups where the principals know each other too well or dislike each other so much that they will be enlightened and bond by the end of the film. You know how it all will turn out, so after that smart opening, the film devolves into clichéd expectation fulfillment.

However, scenes between Wally and six-year old Sebastian (Thomas Robinson), his son by the switch but a secret to mother and son for much of the film, are well-acted given the appropriate level of dialogue, their mutual respect, and the film's unwillingness to exploit Robinson's cuteness to elicit favorable reviews. But after all, like his dad, Sebastian's a pessimist with eccentric and sometimes macabre tastes, not always exploitable characteristics. In any case, these two actors are as good as one could expect to show a loving relationship between two eccentrics who don't know for some time they are related.

Saving the film from my impending "C" grade are Jeff Goldblum as Leonard, Wally's best male friend; the cute Thomas Robinson as Sebastian, Kassie's son; and manic Juliette Lewis as Debbie, Kassie's best girl friend. With weak competition like Bow Wow in Lottery Ticket, Aniston manages to be in a film just a bit above my average. Too bad because that opening is worth seeing just for itself.