Three Reasons to Love Nancy Meyers
In Sunday’s The New York Times Magazine’s Daphne Merkin profiled Nancy Meyers, calling her “the most powerful writer-director-producer currently working” in Hollywood. She is the voice behind “What Women Want,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “The Holiday” and the Christmas ‘09 release, “It’s Complicated.” Her protagonists are often divorced, 50-something professional women trying to balance their families and their romantic lives — a tough sell for youth-obsessed Hollywood.
Merkin refers to Meyers’ movies as having “a rosy unconflicted presentation” and “an air of tidy unreality,” but I like them, and it sounds like, on balance, Merkin does too. Tidy unreality is, after all, the nature of Hollywood. But Merkin also writes that in Meyers movies, “55 year-old-women implausibly exert charms that no 25-year-old can hold a candle to,” and describes the middle aged woman as a “sorry creature,” both of which make me wonder if Merkin buys into the ageist Hollywood culture she’s attempting to examine.
However, Merkin does point out a number of reasons to love Nancy Meyers, all of which make me want to check out “It’s Complicated” when it comes out this weekend.
Here are three:
1. As Callie Khouri (writer of “Thelma and Louise” and director of “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”) said, “She’s defied conventional wisdom that women are over - both societally and professionally - past a certain age.”
2. Her male stars, which include Mel Gibson, Jack Nicholson and Alec Baldwin, “have a slightly misogynistic buzz to them,” and in the course of the movie they have to “relearn” how to relate to a smart, human and sophisticated female character.
3. Meyers got her foot in the door with then husband Charles Shyer, but her career has been the one that has flourished since their split, proving not only that women can make it on their own, but that their voices gain power when they dare to fly solo.
