Once, Twice, Three Times a Cheater: THE OTHER WOMAN

The Other Woman is a light and amiable wish-fulfillment revenge comedy with all the tonal mismanagement that pile-up of descriptors suggests. Getting off to a good start, the film introduces us to a high-powered New York City lawyer (Cameron Diaz) head-over-heels for her new rich, handsome boyfriend (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). He’s her first serious relationship in many years. Too bad, then, that he’s married. When she finds out she’s understandably hurt, but not as much as his wife (Leslie Mann) is. He doesn’t know they know, and certainly doesn’t know they then spied on him and uncovered a second unsuspecting mistress (Kate Upton). From there the three women team up to get revenge on this no-good sleazeball. At first they play pranks, like putting a laxative in his water or estrogen in his power shake. But they don’t just want him humiliated. They want him to hurt. So they target his most vulnerable part: his wallet.

Totally uninterested in making this a dark or biting comedy, the screenplay by Melissa Stack finds fizzy complications that are treated as a lark. This leads to some gross-out gags like a defecating dog or a man in a fancy restaurant having an urgent bowel movement (what is it with this movie and poop?) that are certainly gross and might even make you gag, but I didn’t find them too funny. Okay, that second one was a little funny, but seems out of place, because elsewhere the emotions of the women are triangulated for comedy and light drama. Their common goal includes shifting desires and expectations for each of them at different points. They’ve certainly become friends under unusual circumstances, so it makes sense they wouldn’t always be on the same page. The wife, especially, has her doubts. Sure, he was cheating, but she wonders if that’s reason enough to throw away their marriage?

That’s an interesting question, or at least could be. But Stack’s script isn’t interested in exploring that. It’s too busy alternating between bubbly and goofy. Director Nick Cassavetes (of The Notebook and My Sister’s Keeper) shoots the film glossily. Everything is brightly lit and gleaming. The surroundings are as rich and white as the characters – big glass-covered offices, spacious high-rise apartments, and gorgeous beach houses. But I suppose that’s part of the wish-fulfillment of it all. Not only do we get to watch three beautiful women plot against an awful chauvinist, but we also get to see fancy clothes and nice architecture while they do it. Everyone’s so well off they can drop everything and go to the Hamptons or the Bahamas on a stakeout. Must be nice. I mean, aside from the whole finding out you’re all being cheated on thing.

What keeps this sloppy script and sparkling studio airiness watchable and even at times enjoyable is the strength of the cast. The three women at the center of the plot hold it down with their likable chemistry and funny personalities. They’re all clearly in their acting comfort zones, relaxed and capable of wringing laughs out of the sometimes lame material. One of them actually sells the old looking-through-the-wrong-end-of-binoculars sight gag. That’s no small feat. Leslie Mann is appealing as a tightly wound housewife who increasingly spirals into a manic panic over her husband’s infidelities before finding the clarifying purpose of plotting revenge. Cameron Diaz is fizzy and sarcastic, able to whip up a plan of action and have fun doing it. And Kate Upton is awfully good at selling ditziness, even if her character remains only a happy, curvaceous blank-slate. Seriously, what does she even do? Where does she go when she’s not on screen? We’ll never know.

They aren’t exactly the second coming of 9 to 5, the three-women-take-down-dumb-guy revenge comedy The Other Woman occasionally resembles, but that’s not entirely their fault. Get these three characters in a scene together, trading lines with one another, and it’s all pleasantly enjoyable. Mann’s flighty worry bounces nicely off of Diaz’s wry cynicism and Upton’s airheaded charm proves a fine glue to hold the trio together. But the movie has less to say about female empowerment than you’d hope, keeping the ladies firmly in their stereotypes. The tone wobbles all the way to the end, mixing broad slapstick and blunt innuendo right up to the climax in which the comeuppance we’ve been waiting for is a bit too eagerly vindictive. The movie doesn’t seem to think very highly of any of its characters, even the side characters like a small role for Nicki Minaj that dilutes the snap of her rap persona. That's a factor in the mishandled mood and empty point of view - are we supposed to root for them or view it all at a satiric remove? - that make for a hard movie to embrace. I didn’t mind it too much, laughing at times and smiling a few more, but it’s so slight and forgettable it’ll probably play even better in the middle of a weekend afternoon on TBS.

My Sister's Keeper (2009)

From the time she took her first breath, eleven-year-old Anna (Abigail Breslin) has been donating blood, tissues, and organs to her sister’s leukemia fight. Now, with a dangerous transplant operation looming, Anna decides she’s had enough. She hires a hot-shot lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to sue her parents for medical emancipation. This sets the stage for My Sister’s Keeper, an adaptation of the Jodi Picoult novel, it shares its source’s main strengths and its main problem. Both book and film have a great grabber of a concept that plays on the heartstrings but neither have any way of satisfyingly resolving its central moral dilemma.

With whom do you side? Is it the young girl who is frustrated at being created for the sole purpose of keeping her sister alive? Is it the exhausted-yet-determined mom (Cameron Diaz) who won’t stop fighting until her sick child is well? This is truly a matter of life and death. It’s not easy to take a side. There are no easy answers, and the movie isn’t interested in answering them, all for the better. The movie gets by on its emotionally resonating performances (Diaz is a standout). As a result, for most of its runtime, the movie is a super-slick Hollywood tear-jerker, a three-hankie salute to disease that is shot through with nearly suffocating sentimentality. This movie is on a mission to make you cry. The only discordant notes are struck with dreary and sappy soundtrack choices, bad songs to go with terrible montages.

The courtroom drama aspect of the plot is shoved to the background, the filmmakers choosing to instead focus on the grueling medical procedures and slow-motion decay of its central girl. Young actress Sofia Vassilieva is dolled up in the trappings of a cancer-patient with admirable attention to detail from the make-up department. It’s unflinchingly frank at times. The movie barely starts and we’ve seen our first nosebleed. Vomiting blood, eerie veins under pale translucent skin, and creeping bruises also make appearances. I really should have thought twice before buying the popcorn I ended up barely touching. All the attention to medical detail creates a visceral sense of what the family (we bounce between points of view, which unfortunately means narration replaces subtext) is arguing about, grounding the melodrama in ways a network TV-movie couldn’t. This is not a film that is shy about its topic.

And yet, the movie can’t bring its varying threads to a satisfying close. Instead, it goes into emotional overdrive – albeit in a different way than in the novel – yanking on the heartstrings and massaging the tear ducts with such single-minded intensity that it would seem the filmmakers would like your sobbing to cover up the lack of conclusion. (The book and movie differ only in content, not quality). Though there is certainly an endpoint to the plot – something definitively final occurs – there is no emotional resolution. Diaz, especially, is asked to sell some rushed characterization that I just didn’t buy.

Director Nick Cassavetes, who previously directed the equally teary The Notebook, knows the time and location of the buttons to press, though. As a disease-of-the-week weeper, My Sister’s Keeper is a mostly acceptable entry. It goes through the motions, and puts it audience through the emotional wringer, even if it doesn’t quite add up in the end.