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.
