Prime

Plainly, I just didn’t get the joke. Or maybe I did, and I just didn’t think it was all that funny.

Rafi (Uma Thurman) is a 37 year-old recently divorced depressed person, who is seeing Dr. Lisa Metzger (Meryl Streep), a super awesome psychiatrist, to help her through the difficult time. Months after her divorce is final, Rafi meets 23 year-old David (Bryan Greenberg) through a mutual acquaintance, and apprehensively agrees to a date after Lisa’s strong encouragement. While hesitant to become too serious with David due to the 14-year age difference between them, Rafi can’t help but let loose with the fun-loving David, who makes her laugh and is so eager to please her—in a variety of ways. Through great feats of simple deductive skills, Lisa brilliantly puts two and two together after Rafi reveals details about her new paramour, and realizes with horror that Rafi’s new young lover is, in fact, her son. Lisa consults with a colleague about her ethical obligations in continuing treatment of Rafi, at which her colleague scoffs and says that conflicts of interest are no longer considered unethical due to their nature as being boring subjects for movies. With that moral dilemma now having been completely ignored, we can proceed to have a session in which Rafi talks candidly about the couple’s love life, which is funny because, like, Lisa is David’s mother! So Lisa makes an assortment of uncomfortable facial expressions, to which Rafi responds by inexplicably deciding to describe, in detail, the finer aspects of David’s penis. For ten. Long. Minutes.

Eventually, as we see from the previews, Lisa gets tired of hearing about myriads of sexual adventures and tells Rafi that David is her son, which is when things get quite interesting. Sadly, however, the rest of the movie explores the very serious issues behind romantic relationships involving two people with different religious backgrounds, as well as large disparities in age.

The supposed main premise that a psychiatrist is counseling a woman who is dating her son was definitely amusing, but the joke quickly became overused and then discarded altogether. The real focus is instead stubbornly kept on real relationship problems as opposed to lighter romantic comedy antics. There is a very funny pie-throwing gag that runs throughout the duration of the movie, and there are of course multiple scenes that seemed cause for laughter; but, on the whole, this movie failed miserably as a romantic comedy.

If I hadn’t been lured into the theater with the promise of a hilarious film, then perhaps I wouldn’t be so annoyed. In all fairness, it was a decent story about love and the obstacles that two people face in making a difficult situation work—in other words, it was like a chick flick gone tragically wrong. The movie was way too serious for its supposedly silly base, so I would classify it more as a dramatic comedy and recommend it only as such.