Nancy Meyers' 2003 "Something's Gotta Give"

The manic/tender/stutteringly modernist spirit of Preston Sturges possessed Nancy Meyers as she wrote this modern screwball gem. Diane Keaton channels Jerry Lewis to deliver 10 performances for the ages; she works out like 57 facial muscles within the span of 10 seconds as she fully embodies the tragicomic playwright that Socrates in the Symposium saw as the premium artist. Special movie.

There is no better time to explore the wonderful filmmaker Nancy Meyers than now. A great resurgence of attention to her work has occurred as a result of the tragic passing of Diane Keaton at a relatively young age, 79. The result, is it a bittersweet coincidence?, was that Nancy was able, just last year, to secure funding for her film Paris, Paramount, starring Penélope Cruz, Kieran Culkin, Jude Law, Owen Wilson, and others, about “a filmmaker and producer who were once romantic and creative partners reunite years after their breakup to make a new movie together, navigating their complicated relationship while dealing with volatile stars on their high-stakes production.” A classic Meyers scenario, and one which promises to be fascinating to the heads who know the game. The re-release, too, of Something’s Gotta Give (2003) in AMC theaters, was also a boon for Meyers’ recent reputation. (She has not made a film since the thoroughly underrated Intern, 2015, with Anne Hathaway and Robert de Niro.) Many loopy, screwball-type reversals proliferate throughout Something’s Gotta Give. The biggest riposte to conventional industry wisdom, clearly, is in its casting of two older stars, Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson — which didn’t at all spell box-office poison for the film’s chances, as shown by its financial performance and its beloved status today from those of all generations.

Keaton’s passing at the age of seventy-nine, which prompted my first watch of Something’s Gotta Give, has a lot of us reeling, as you can imagine. Born Diane Hall in Los Angeles in 1946, raised in a middle-class Protestant family in Santa Ana, she emerged from the world of late-’60s New York theater—she was one of the hippie ensemble in the original Broadway production of Hair—and specifically from Sandy Meisner’s acting studio. Her rise in the 1970s, beginning with her Kay Adams in The Godfather (1972) and continuing with her Oscar-winning titular role in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, made her the definitive American movie actress of the era: a comic original in the lineage of Hepburn and Carole Lombard but with a nervous, daffy modernity all her own. (Late in life she would write multiple wonderful and revealing memoirs, the crown jewel of which, Then Again of 2011, is billed as a dual memoir of Keaton and her mother, Dorothy.) Beyond acting, her work sprawled widely: director of four feature films and the aforementioned modern masterpiece Heaven, memoirist, underrated photographer in the Sherrie Levine/Richard Prince/Cindy Sherman postmodern lineage, thrift shop rat, and accidental fashion revolutionary whose menswear-inflected silhouettes reshaped mainstream style. Keaton’s career, so often reduced to the Annie Hall image of tie-vest-hat, is in fact an American epic in miniature: a six-decade body of work shaped by curiosity, self-invention, and the restless instinct to look at familiar things—romantic comedy, family melodrama, the concept of heaven—from the oddest of angles.

And now a spoiler discussion….

Yeah, clearly, Keanu is the right choice — buuuuuut that’s the narratively obvious choice, and humans have a nasty (tragicomic) tendency not to choose what’s best for them. Instead, let’s go on a trip with the rizzy raisin. And the crying montage….That’s it! That’s what it’s like: the pain channeled into the art. Still can’t get over that Jack Nicholson is playing a hip-hop mogul. For those of us who love a good ole fashioned fake Hollywood ending à la His Girl Friday — boy, do I have a chestnut for you…