The trailer for Ben Younger's

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The trailer for Ben Younger's Prime (Universal, opening today) told you the film would be sitcommy and Nora Ephronish. And the trailer guys lied. (Big surprise!) They sold the set-up -- Jewish middle-aged Manhattan therapist (Meryl Streep) realizes that the much younger man that her 37 year-old patient (Uma Thurman) is having an affair with is her 23 year-old son (Bryan Greenberg) -- and, of course, ignored what the film is. Prime is, okay, slightly contrived but also an engaging, not boring, socially acute, well-performed New York adult romantic comedy. The issues are not just the difficulties in a hot love affair between a woman nudging 40 and a guy just out of college, but more fundamentally the difficulties in selling a possible long-term relationship with an older blonde shiksa to the younger man's New York Jewish family. Craft-wise and in terms of the art of hitting the right emotional note in just the right way, Prime isn't quite on the level of In Her Shoes, but it's smart, fairly observant and open-hearted...not half bad. Streep is deliciously funny in some scenes, down-to-it earthy and solemn in others -- she's reason alone to see this thing. Thurman delivers a prickly, particular, up-and-down emotional portrait of a recognizably willful New York woman. And Greenberg is pretty good. (My problem is that if I were a woman or gay, he wouldn't be my type...plus he doesn't look like the son of Streep and John Rothman, who plays his dad.) I was more than a little surprised by this thing. Pay no mind to what some of those prick critics on Rotten Tomatoes are saying. The only thing I really didn't care for is the ending -- if Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins can make it work, why not others? It's been five years since Younger's last film, Boiler Room...where's he been?

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