Retro Review by Will Carr
The name Nancy Meyers immediately conjures images of beige sweaters and beautiful kitchens. Her films have a recognizable look, tone, and thematic thread that can be traced from the beginning of her career to today. Having produced, written, and directed the highest grossing romantic comedy of all time, she is one of the most financially successful female directors working today. Her work is often dismissed and derided as Nancy Meyers is rarely thought of seriously as an auteur director, nor is there much serious academic writing analyzing her career.
Meyers’s films are typically ignored by critics because she works almost exclusively in the romantic comedy genre. These films are often perceived by critics as formulaic cash-grabs that are cheap and easy for studios to pump out. They don’t require extravagant special effects budgets or contain over the top action choreography. Those few romantic comedies that do achieve major critical acclaim tend to be the ones that break the mold or reimagine the genre. Annie Hall and Groundhog Day are two of the most well-known—and notably male-centered—examples of this. Nancy Meyers loves an easy to follow formula; her plots tend to be straightforward and her protagonists’ goals are simple. Her role as Hollywood’s reigning rom-com queen has made it all the easier for critics to dismiss her films as just another paint-by-numbers romantic comedy.
Meyers has directed six features since her 1998 debut The Parent Trap, and all of them have been sizable box office successes. Her three biggest hits (What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give, and It’s Complicated) have all grossed well over $100 million domestically, making Meyers one of the only women consistently producing, writing, and directing financial successes within the Hollywood system. Despite all of this, critics have largely ignored Meyers. Many of them find Meyers’s reliance on genre and gender conventions to be reductive and unworthy of attention, and her bourgeois mise-en-scène to be a hallow distraction. Meyers’s strict adherence to the romance formula has made it easy for critics to dismiss her work.
Her 2009 film It’s Complicated provides the perfect framework for what people expect from a Nancy Meyers movie. The film centers around Jane Adler (Meryl Streep), a successful bakery owner who begins an affair with her ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) ten years after her divorce. Things are further complicated when she begins to fall for Adam (Steve Martin), the architect redesigning her home. The glorious interiors of Jane’s home belong within the pages of Architectural Digest. The design of Meyers’s interiors are the perfect intersection between comfort and function; they tear down the viewer’s defenses and lull them into a feathery daydream of delicate pashminas, excessive throw pillows, and white kitchens.
A common criticism of Meyers is that her characters are untouchable: the sets are too lavish and the characters too well-off. How could someone ever relate to a person this successful that lives in a home like this? Steve Martin expressed this very concern when working with Meyers on It’s Complicated; he recalled saying to Meyers, “This is an awfully fancy home you’re asking people to identify with.” Meyers’s sets harken back to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s: The Philadelphia Story (1940), It Happened One Night (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), etc. These characters were often exuberantly wealthy and lived in a world most people could never identify with. It’s an intentional exaggeration of a white, upper class, bourgeois lifestyle that dominated films from Hollywood’s Golden Age.
It’s Complicated also introduces one of Meyers’s recurring elements: divorce. The characters of Meyers’s film are often threatened by or have already dealt with divorce. Meyer’s herself went through a divorce from her romantic and creative partner, Charles Shyer, that still shapes her work today. Divorced women of Meyers’s films are loved and wanted by those around them. In It’s Complicated, that is especially true and the woman finds herself at the center of a love triangle that features two incredibly desirable men. Meyers movies make divorce seem less scary than other films. Instead of being forced into celibacy, Meyers shows that women can still be desirable and find love after divorce.
As Daphne Merkin wrote in her 2009 profile of Nancy Meyers, “It might be said that Meyers […] has spun gold from the hay of her own losses, turning the painful aftermath of divorce into comedies where she, in the form of her characters, gets to call all the shots.” Meyers’s films serve to fulfill her own fantasies as well as those of women in their 50s and 60s, a rarity in Hollywood films. The women of her films are loved and desired by their counterparts; she relishes in her women being pursued by men. Meyers gives women like her the precious opportunity to see themselves reflected on the screen.
The dominant theme of Meyers’s work is desire; she wants women to feel wanted and loved. The way Meyers expresses this in Something’s Gotta Give is similar to how she does it in It’s Complicated. In both films, the women are placed in the middle of love triangles, each featuring two extremely desirable suitors. In Something’s Gotta Give this role is filled by Harry, the 63-year-old music executive, and Julian (Keanu Reeves), the successful thirty-something doctor. Casting plays an important role. Meyers cast Keanu Reeves as the smart and attractive doctor during the height of his movie star prowess.
By putting Erica at the center of this love triangle, Meyers makes her the focus of all desires. Older women are rarely the focus of such clear romantic attention, making Meyers’s films an anomaly. When Harry looks Erica in the eyes and tells her, “You are a woman to love,” he is not just talking to Erica; he is talking to any woman over fifty. By casting two of Hollywood’s most famous heartthrobs, Meyers allows older women to indulge in fantasies that are not represented on screen. It is hard to name another director that would cast Keanu Reeves in a relationship with Diane Keaton, but Meyers does. When she makes an older woman the focal point of desire, she is signaling to all women that they too are desirable; they too can be wooed by Jack Nicholson or Keanu Reeves.
Shifting gears to a different type of desire: Meyers has a reputation of being extremely controlling on sets. She makes actors perform excessive retakes and carefully oversees every bit of mise-en-scène. Producer Scott Rudin has said that Meyer’s set are used to clearly convey character and plot, saying about It’s Complicated, “Everything — the silverware, the food in the fridge — is part of the narrative. I’ve seen Nancy walk around the set and change the books on the shelf because she doesn’t think the character would read them.” Her attention to detail is often what makes Meyers’s film stand out from other romantic comedies, but it is also a bit of a curse. Her films often run over-schedule and over-budget due to reshoots. She insists that every frame be perfect. Over time, this a built a narrative that Meyers is a control freak with a Kubrickian obsession over sweaters and house plants.
Many critics find Meyers’s fixation on minor household details inane. Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles were regarded as geniuses for their obsession with minutia; Nancy Meyers is dismissed for it. Because the intricacies she tends to focus on are considered more feminine, they are easy for critics to dismiss. Her work is made for women, and male critics are less likely to appreciate many of the flourishes Meyers puts in her films. However, that is no reason for the critical community to dismiss or ignore them. Meyers’s work is as artistically and financially successful as her male counterparts working in similar genres.
Meyers’s filmography has a consistent style and tone, and critics and moviegoers take note of this. Everyone knows what a Nancy Meyers movie looks like. Despite this, most dismiss the idea of her as an auteur. Meyers is just as worthy of the auteur title as any of her contemporaries. Her focus on representing older women permeates most of her work, and divorce is a common motif within her body of work. Over her 20 year career, Meyers has carved herself a stop as an auteur of the rom-com that is deserving of recognition.