Watched this with the girlfriend tonight. Cute little film, but it never manages to rise above mediocrity. The concept, of Jennifer Aniston getting pregnant by her boyfriend but deciding to raise the baby with her gay roommate, has potential to defy the conventions of your standard romantic-comedy but can't quite bring anything new to the table.
Paul Rudd is easily the best part of the film. He manages gay without resorting to cliches, and him and Tim "Superman" Daly manage convincing chemistry as the on-again, off-again couple throughout the film. The same can't be said for the actor that portrays Rudd's second beau, Paul. He's not much more than a boy toy, and the situation he's in as the live-in ward of a rich, elitist, gay Shakespearean scholar is one of the many superfluous subplots this film flirts with and fails to fully expand.
Jennifer Aniston is fine. She's basically Rachel from Friends, especially in the season the character was pregnant. At first she sounded like she was trying to pull off New York Jewish, but the accent fades just as quickly as any attention paid to her character being a social worker. Luckily her and Rudd do have solid chemisty together, it's easy to see why they're best friends, but that leads into the unfortunate necessity of the plot...
Aniston's character falls in love with Rudd, and the movie decides to fork off in fifty directions. Why have her be pregnant? It serves little consequence other than to cause problems with John Pankow's Vince character, a character that was already jealous of Rudd. Vince, btw, is introduced as a provocative character, a starving lawyer that wants to unionize everything and obviously has a big problem with the rich circles Aniston and Rudd associate with. Unfortunately he's made into a total douchebag when Aniston tells him she's raising the baby with Rudd, only for him to return later in the movie with little apology or explanation for his mood shift.
Oh yeah, Alan Alda is in here as well as Aniston's stepsister's husband. The age difference is baffling, as the movie never explores it, and considering the stepsister is Alda's second marriage it felt like Alda was supposed to be Aniston's father but a last minute script rewrite changed that.
There are attempts here at exploring gender politics, sexuality, and class differences (even a little bit of race politics) but none of it goes anywhere. Honestly I started to hate Aniston's character as she throws herself at Rudd and practically begs him to be straight and marry her when he's nothing but honest with her the entire film about his position: he fucks guys!
Speaking of which, for an R-rated film that otherwise could have been PG-13, "fuck" is thrown around like nobody's business. It's strange, there's no other harsh language except fuck, but that word is used pretty casually.
For a better look at confused sexuality at the turn of the century, check out Kissing Jessica Stein.
