05-06-10 Movie Review - The Back-Up Plan

The noncommercial movie scene is all but shut down for the next few days, with the only offering being the THURSDAY night movie at the Murdock – switching from Fridays to Thursdays to make way for the seasonal rush on weddings that actually support the place. This very THURSDAY night at 7:30, the Murdock, 536 North Broadway, is offering The Notebook, from 2004, a romantic indulgence with a remarkable cast of Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, James Garner, Gena Rowlands, Joan Allen, Sam Shepard, and more, from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, directed by Nick Cassavetes, who usually isn’t this given to emotion.

And you might want to give The Notebook a try, if you’re in a mood for romance, because The Back-Up Plan, while it starts out looking like a happy light romance, about halfway through turns into something a little grizzly than you might care for.

It starts with the customary romantic silliness in which Jennifer Lopez, who has surely never looked more irresistible, on the very day she starts her in vitriol treatments to have a baby, meets the man who everybody in the audience will immediately know to going to be her true love: The Back-Up Plan does not pretend to subtlety and is not ashamed of the good old romantic conventions. Alex O’Loughlin and Lopez do not even start out as enemies the way Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn always did; they are quite obviously attracted to each other, though Lopez has been made wary of men by past experience, which is why she decided to have her baby alone. There is so little obstacle to this affair that some may feel that nothing is happening as we go through a series of chance encounters and casual drinks and dinners, made pleasant by the principles and other characters we like an confidently wait for the best for.

But long about halfway throught, The Back-Up Plan gets Lopez into a support group for single mothers, and things start getting more realistic in terms of the less attractive sides of advanced pregnancy, with upset stomachs and messy gluttony, and then into really unpleasant things like what children may find to eat in park sandboxes and defecation during delivery and water breaking in public and even more public delivery itself. The movie as a whole remains attractive for its characters, and deserves praise for avoiding some of the most tiresome clichés such as O’Loughlin’s curiosity and jealousy about the sperm donor and the expected moral preachments against single motherhood, none of which ever happen; Lopez’s prenatal irrationality begins to wear on poor O’Loughlin, that’s about all. But the tone of things changes, to unfortunate effect. One might even appreciate the realism, if the first part of The Back-Up Plan hadn’t been so misleading.

It isn’t my kind of movie, and I can’t judge how funny it is or even how funny it is supposed to be; the only person I’ve talked to who actually saw The Back-Up Plan started by giving it four stars and then halfway changed his mind. I wouldn’t rate it that high, but I think the critics have been unfair to it. But you’d better hurry; it may not be here very long