Kassie sets up a fertility party.
Of course
Kassie (Jennifer Aniston) and Wally (Jason Bateman) belong together. It's just a
matter of when they wake up to the inevitable. At the outset of The Switch,
they are the best of friends. Kassie has decided that at fortyish she must get
pregnant now or surrender the possibility. Overlooking her willing best friend
Wally, she chooses a sperm donor who looks fine on paper but is a self-absorbed
jerk named Roland (Patrick Wilson).
It's not
clear to me exactly when in our new culture sperm donorship became an occasion
for public celebration, but clearly it's an idea whose time has come. Kassie
sets up a fertility party - a sort of drunken cocktail party to serve as witness
to her public impregnation. Donor Roland goes in the bathroom and does his
thing, leaving the cup unattended on the shelf. When a thoroughly soused and
discouraged Wally comes in to throw up, he knocks the cup over and replaces it
with his own donation. Premise established, the rest of the movie follows the
relationship between Wally and 6 year old Sebastian (Thomas Robinson),
biological father and son.
Jason Bateman
and Thomas Robinson manage to infuse Wally and Sebastian with enough comic
similarities to win the audience entirely. The modest charm of this romantic
comedy is that the courtship that matters most is the one between these two.
They walk and talk and play together in the tones and language of grownups.
Little Sebastian is enveloped in a thoroughly irresistible adult seriousness
that avoids the trap of cuteness. Unaccustomed to being son to a father,
Sebastian treats his dad like a peer. Equally unaccustomed to being father to a
son, Wally treats the little guy as if he were a wise old soul. Theirs is a
lovely chemistry that generates affectionate laughter in the audience.
Jennifer
Aniston is in a serious pickle here. Given two such accomplished performers to
play against, her job is nearly impossible. To her credit, she never tries to
upstage her male co-stars, but she just doesn't have the spark necessary to win
us over. She can't hold the screen with the guys.
It may well
be that 2010 marks Hollywood's final breakthrough to the Internet age where an
infinite amount of unfiltered information makes all subjects common
conversational currency. One of the years's best movies, The Kids Are All
Right, legitimized gay marriage, lesbian sex, and sperm donors as screen
subjects. The Switch has taught us that turkey basters and fertility
parties now earn a PG-13 rating. It is both inevitable and OK that in the
Internet age the speed of change has shortened to roughly a year from the old
measure of a generation; but is it unreasonable to hope that after the dust
settles, the communal movie screen might still occasionally surprise us with a
small measure of the mystery and magic that has drawn us to movies for so long?
Copyright (c) Illusion