-By Frank Lovece

For movie details, please click here.

Hard as it may be to believe when heavyweights Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin head the cast, but it's John Krasinksi who salvages what little good comes of It's Complicated, a trifle without a single sincere emotion. Aimed squarely and solely at women of a certain age, it panders to their fantasy of being a rich, successful woman with perfect kids, supportive and wisecracking friends, and two men in love with her. Writer-director Nancy Meyers' patronizing tale may have a lifetime on Lifetime, but there aren't enough golden girls in the world for this rom-com to earn enough theatrical box office to make back its stars' likely salaries alone.

In Meyers' world—which may very well be the world she and a sliver of a percentage of other women live in—elegant Santa Barbara fifty-something Jane Adler (Streep) has a cute, creative career running an upscale pastry café with a large staff of chefs and cooks making fresh croissants from scratch. In this economy, she's successful enough to be building a large, two-story extension to her already luxurious spread. Her three blond, privileged children love her and each other with group hugs, and when her middle child, Luke (Hunter Parrish), graduates from a private college in New York City, she treats daughters Gabby (Zoe Kazan) and Lauren (Caitlin Fitzgerald) and the latter's fiancé Harley (Krasinski) to a stay in one of Manhattan's most expensive hotels; she hands Luke her credit card for a bash with his friends. The fact her children are smiley ciphers whose college majors/career life-plans we never learn is no reflection on Jane's parenting, but on Meyers' writing.

Jane's been divorced a decade from philandering attorney Jake (Baldwin), who married a young cipher himself: Agness (Lake Bell), a hot but hard-faced harpy whose entire characterization consists of "bitch with tiger tattoo." Jake, who's put-upon by both her and her whiny, demanding five-year-old (Emjay Anthony) from another relationship, has remained friendly with Jane, and while in New York for Luke's commencement has a drunken one-night stand with his ex. Against her better judgment, Jane continues being the other woman with the charmingly boyish Jake after they return to California. Things get, well, complicated when she and her architect, Adam (Steve Martin, doing line readings like a high-school drama student), start to fall for each other. Mary Kay Place, Rita Wilson and Alexandra Wentworth are wasted as Jane's catty Greek chorus.

Trading dramatic expression for blunt, subtext-free talk—"We both grew into the people we wanted each other to be," Jake states at one point, irony-free—Meyers' plodding and repetitive screenplay is neither engaging nor surprising. As a director, she films more shots of cars pulling up or leaving than in a Chrysler commercial. Aside from a few moments when Streep and Baldwin rise above the gauzy goo with perfect, deadpan timing, the only scenes with life come courtesy of Krasinski starting midway through, when the comically horrified Harley stumbles onto his future mother-in-law's affair and goes to hilariously stricken convolutions to keep the revelation from her and everyone else. He gets more laughs with the words "Well, OK" in one scene than everyone else gets in the whole film.