Prime

There's a new trend in Hollywood these days, they're trying to be indie, even with big names attached to their movies, and they're leaving the fairy tale stories behind. There's less and less cute boy meets cute girl, hate each other, fall in love, get in a fight, break up and then reconcile at the end of the movie and live happily ever after. The characters these days are not perfect, the stories are more normal even if still kind of stupid overall, but most importantly, there's no falling in love at the end and living together in love forever. I mean, there's still some like that, those movies are necessary because they make more money, but these new ones, in which the characters learn from what happens to them and move on, are better, and that's the case of Ben Younger's Prime.

And the lead in this movie is not multiple Academy Award winner Meryl Streep, or Academy Award Nominee Uma Thurman, is Bryan Greenberg, whose last project was the Clooney-Soderbergh HBO series Unscripted, which has still not been renewed after its first season. Greenberg plays David Bloomberg, a 23 year old Jewish artist who falls in love with Thurman's 37 year old Rafi Gardet, recently divorced, and not Jewish. This is already a problem, as the relationship can't go anywhere, plus Rafi would like a baby and she would need that to happen soon but David is too young to be a father. So Rafi talks to her therapist Lisa Metzger (Streep) who tells her that if he's making her happy, she should stick with him and see where it goes, and so she does. This works perfectly for a while, until Lisa finds out the truth, that David is her son. This should not have been spoiled by the trailers like it did, because I was always trying to see if they could've find out earlier but it was very well done. Lisa and David's last names are different because she uses her maiden name as a professional, and Lisa could not realize before that they were talking about each other because none of them said the names and both of the lied to her about their age. Rafi said her new boyfriend was 27 and David said his new girlfriend was 27, and the age difference was still important enough for Lisa to worry about them. But anyway, she finds out, and what should be a deal breaker continues after Lisa goes to see her own therapist Rita (Madhur Jaffrey) who tells her that is her professional responsibility to keep working on Rafi, and so she does. This brings much comedy from Streep, specially when Rafi tells her about her love life with David. The story goes somewhere, and the ending is really good, though I think that they stretched it a little bit, even though the movie is only 105 minutes long.

As I mentioned before, Streep shines in her role. She has a million facial expressions to respond to every one of the Rafi and David erotic tales. I was not sure that Streep could pull this comedic role off but she did and she was great. Uma is looking hot as always and she's got a couple really good emotional moments with Greenberg, and this guy is going to be really big one day. He's charismatic, funny and good looking, and he's better than expected considering he's working with two big names like Uma and Streep.
The other supporting character with noting is Jon Abrahams who plays David's friend Morris, who has a thing about throwing pies to girls that wont go out with him a second time, a subplot that is funny at first, but ends up going nowhere.

Don't get thrown off by the title, which I have no idea what they meant by it in this case, because the acting is superb, with some really funny scenes to laugh at. Ben Younger's work is very good, script wise and behind the camera, and the great, touching ending is what makes Prime better than it should, worth watching and very good overall.