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Kassie sets up a fertility party.
The Switch
An Illusion Review by Joan Ellis
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?
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