Friends with Kids, 2011.
Written and Directed by Jennifer Westfeldt.
Starring Adam Scott, Jennifer Westfeldt, Kristen Wiig, Jon Hamm, Maya Rudolph, Chris O’Dowd, Megan Fox and Edward Burns.
SYNOPSIS:
Two best friends decide to have a child together while keeping their relationship platonic.
When it comes to having kids most people would agree that once you have them it puts on dampener on your marriage. You have to give all of your time and attention to child and in some cases that doesn’t bode well for the relationship you have with your spouse. But, what if you could have a kid and not have to worry about it conflicting with your marriage? Is it possible to have a kid in a strictly platonic relationship? Friend with Kids answers that question.
Friends with Kids stars Jennifer Westfeldt and Adam Scott as Julie and Jason, two best friends who know everything there is to know about one another. They’ve been best friends for years but have never been attracted to one another. Every so often they get together with their friends Ben (Jon Hamm), Missy (Kristen Wiig), Leslie (Maya Rudolph) and Alex (Chris O’Dowd). All their friends are married and starting to have babies. Once Julie and Jason see how having babies have changed their friends lives they come up with an idea to have a baby as friends, that way it won’t ruin the relationship they have with each other. Everyone thinks this plan will never work but Julie and Jason decide to go for it and hope that they can be happy with this situation rather than what most would consider to be a normal family.
For me this movie worked mainly because of the chemistry between all the couples. Not only are they believable as friends but they are also believable in their own individual couples. Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd are the couple that fight all the time but still love each other and have altered their lives for the better of their kids. They work really well together and had some of the best chemistry. Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig are the couple that starts to have major problems once they have a kid together. I would have liked to have seen a little more of their characters but they were both good nonetheless. As for Adam Scott and Jennifer Westfeldt, I thought they were good together. Scott is clearly the better actor of the two but you can believe them as friends and the problems that start to arise once they start up relationships with other people.
There isn’t much I didn’t like about Friends with Kids, but it’s not a particularly great movie either. While all the actors give good performances and the writing and directing by Jennifer Westfeldt is quite good, there just isn’t anything about the movie that makes it standout. It starts getting a little bit too cliched towards the end and I was hoping it wouldn’t go down that route. That’s when the movie went a little downhill for me because they could have had something different than your typical romantic comedy, but instead they settled for the cliche ending.
In the end, Friends with Kids is a fairly average movie. Good performances from its stars and plenty of funny moments, but you can’t help feeling like it could have been somewhat better.
Flickering Myth Rating: Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★
Jake Peffer
Originally published July 29, 2012. Updated April 11, 2018.
