Meryl Streep plays a therapist who encourages a recently divorced patient to date a younger man – until she learns that man is her son.
By:Elise Nakhnikian
Meryl Streep’s name is the first to appear in the opening credits for Prime, and rightly so. Sure, it’s a love story, and yes, the lovers are charming, but nearly all the fun contained in this rudderless star vehicle flows from Streep’s gleefully over-the-top performance.
You’d think the romance would be the fun part. After all, Uma Thurman, John Travolta’s Pulp Fiction Twist partner and Kill Bill’s vengeful Valkyrie, is Rafi Gardet, the female half of the romantic pair. Bryan Greenberg, who plays her boyfriend David Bloomberg, is as babelicious as she is, and the attraction between them feels real. But Rafi’s and David’s family and friends are forever piping up to warn that their romance is doomed, as if the chorus from a Greek tragedy had crashed this little romantic comedy.
After all, as that chorus keeps pointing out, he’s 23 and she’s 37! He’s still living with his grandparents; she’s just coming out of a divorce! And, vey iz mir, she’s not Jewish!
The most steadfast resistance comes from Streep’s Lisa Metzger, who is horrified at the thought of her son dating a Gentile. The central gimmick of the movie which is "revealed" in a scene that might earn a laugh if the trailer and all the advance publicity hadn’t already given away the joke is that Lisa is both David’s mother and Rafi’s therapist, though none of the three knows how the other two are connected. What’s more, Lisa has been enthusiastically promoting the relationship to Rafi, who is obviously benefiting from it, at the same time that she’s been urging David to end it.
Listening to Rafi talk to Lisa about her son and to David talk to his mother about her patient is mildly entertaining until Lisa figures out what’s going on. Then a wacky but barely plausible premise turns squirm-inducing as Lisa decides to stay mum, struggling to maintain her composure while Rafi burbles on about their sex life to her trusted therapist or asks whether she ought to stay with him. Streep plays her part with an endearingly farklempt intensity that makes it queasily funny but let’s face it, that’s a pretty creepy premise for a romantic comedy.
Prime is the kind of hagiographic fictional autobiography (writer/director Ben Younger’s mother is a therapist and he cooked up the idea about 10 years ago, when he was in his early 20s) where the author’s stand-in seems to have strode in from the pages of a Harlequin romance. David’s hunky yet sensitive, a gifted artist, down with the homies, and funny to boot. Trouble is, he’s so wonderful and his relationship with Rafi is so thinly developed that you can’t figure out what’s keeping them apart even as they keep breaking up. Is he playing too much Nintendo? Is she too controlling? Is it that he’s never heard of John Coltrane? Oh, please. They’re both gorgeous, they’re in love, the sex is great, and they bring out the best in each other. Now what was the problem again?
Maybe that’s why Lisa is such a refreshing change of pace: You always know how she’s feeling, and she plays it just broadly enough to be funny. Comfortably padded with a few extra pounds, a squirrels’ nest of a hairdo and ropes of chunky necklaces, she’s forever leaking emotion, like a teakettle at a constant boil.
Everyone else pales next to Streep’s Technicolor Lisa. Thurman tries hard sometimes too hard, as when she smirks and writhes in her hoodie at a hip-
hop club, eager to demonstrate her bona fides but her humorless delivery makes Rafi seem like a bit of a pill at times. Greenberg is hamstrung by a script that doesn’t call for him to do much aside from be charming. And the rest of David’s family is just a collection of stereotypes nagging him about marrying a nice Jewish girl, interrupting one another at the dinner table or noshing on corned beef.
Rafi seems to have no family, but she has the obligatory gay male friend, who pops up now and then to cluck over her and whisk her away to fabulous places. Meanwhile, David’s comic sidekick is so one-dimensional he’s barely there at all, and the whole thing is set in the idealized New York City of youth-flattering movies like Fame and, from the looks of the previews, the upcoming Rent, all artful grit and youthful energy.
One of the few clichés Younger avoided the one where the couple we’ve been rooting for throughout the movie goes off together might actually have improved the ending. Movie conventions exist for a reason: They generally work. Sure, you can break the rules, but only if you have a good reason and a good alternative in mind, the way Woody Allen did when he made the great Annie Hall. It’s not enough to say, as Younger does in the press kit for Prime, that Annie Hall is one of your favorite movies and you’ve always wanted to emulate it.
When Younger is a little older, maybe he’ll develop the chops to do light drama well, and the confidence to put his own stamp on it. But for now, his sophomore effort (he also wrote and directed Boiler Room) only makes you appreciate how hard it must be to make a light comedy float.
Rated PG-13. Contains sexual content including dialogue, and language.

