Now that Jennifer Lopez's The Back-up Plan is just a feverish afterthought, the time has come for yet another I-don't-need-a-man-(yet-I-do) drama, this one starring perpetually broken-up Jennifer Aniston. What? That's her character I'm describing: Kassie seems to spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about Wally (Bateman), her hypochondriac best friend. Upon hearing of her plan to conceive via sperm donor, Wally lets his longtime crush on her come to the fore (along with a bunch of ancient slang like "the friend zone," courtesy of wingman Jeff Goldblum). Wally secretly swaps out a cute stranger's semen for some of his own; cut, improbably, to seven years later and the introduction of a sweetly neurotic child (Robinson), his mother none the wiser.
Don't think too hard about the fact that this much-telegraphed tale comes from Middlesex author Jeffrey Eugenides, nor that it's one of those NYC movies in which single moms float around spotless, spacious apartments. Rather, marvel at the desperate spectacle of three comic leads---Aniston, Bateman and Watchmen's Patrick Wilson as the original donor---being outperformed by the wide-eyed Robinson, a quiet collector of silences. These stars will never be as young as he is; you wish they'd all stop trying.---Joshua Rothkopf
Watch the trailer