Prime
Sometimes people who see movies and write about them are like canaries down the mine, warning the poor miners about asphyxiation from carbon monoxide, or dioxide, or worst of all, the dangers of watching Prime for its entire hideous length …
To be fair to Prime, I caught it as an in flight movie, which is never the best way to see a show. Squashed into hideous 4:3 format, and even with a good set of noise cancelling headphones (gotta love ‘em), there’s no way a movie in the air is like the fun of a good home theatre – especially when you have hostesses interrupting to serve swill to the pigs in battery hen class seats, and the captain decides to interrupt by chatting about the weather at the destination.
Speaking of swill, it’s worth noting how that one time fine old Australian airline Qantas has now descended into abject hideousness, courtesy of the cost cutting campaign of CEO Reich Marshall Dixon and his mates. The food is now below the standard of British Airways, and that’s saying something, since the Brits can’t even begin to imagine breakfast without a handsome serving of baked beans (come back Mel Brooks, fart jokes are needed right now).
The trick in all this is that poseur and ponce, Neil Perry, who’s sold his brand name to Qantas as a way of suggesting that Qantas has lifted its game to the kind of haute cuisine for the masses Perry peddles to the unsuspecting and the unwary. But when you read the fine print, you find out that all the does is “design” the food for first and business class. All the cattle class is get a box with a stale sandwich, branded ‘free spirit’, or some such nonsense (what the hell is a free spirit sandwich with all the moisture and taste of a K-5 ration biscuit?).
While it’s never stated, you can sense Qantas preening about what a fine deal it’s done for the punters having Perry do all its catering.
Someone should start a campaign to nail Perry for branding crimes against humanity, and strip him of all his improperly earned poseur assets. As for Qantas, if you’re going to be a hapless sheep in economy, try Cathay Pacific, because their economy class food knocks the socks off Qantas in business class (and if you don’t believe me, check out how the punters voted last year in rating airlines).
But I guess you can imagine the mood – trapped in a cabin for three and half hours with a dried up crust of bread, and up on the wretched economy cabin screens, there was Prime …
So hey, this is a movie review, let’s forget the food swill, and get down to the visual swill. Imagine this … Uma Thurman as a recently divorced neurotic, who likes to trot off regularly to her shrink to discuss the meaning of life. But wait, her shrink is played by Meryl Streep, so what she’s getting is the female equivalent of Jack Nicholson, with all the tics and gimmicks and deep breaths and coy looks and star acting crap you’d expect of a woman who has visibly turned herself into an appalling caricature of … you’ve guessed it, Meryl Streep.
Trouble is, the show is meant to be a comedy, the kind of New York ersatz Jewish set of jokes about relationships and life in Manhattan which made me yearn after five minutes for the worst films ever made by Woody Allen and Albert Brooks and Neil Simon, and almost anyone else you could mention who’s trawled through this territory.
God knows what audience it’s intended to please because the wrinkle is at once as old as the hills and as kosher as shellfish. Maybe it’s 37 year old women, because that’s the age Thurman claims as hers on screen. Being an older dame and fancy free, she’s encouraged by Streep to get over her divorce by going out and having a fling with a 27 year old younger man (Bryan Greenberg). But here’s the catch, he’s the son of shrink Streep, and as more clues begin to fall like confetti (like Thurman admitting he’s actually 23), the penny begins to drop for Streep.
Meantime, we have lots of coy sex, suggesting that Greenberg is dynamite in bed (and everywhere else) as well as being funny and romantic and cute, even if he does have a little bit of a hard time relating to Thurman’s gay friends.
Whenever he gets desperate, writer director Ben Younger drags in stereotypes of Greenberg dating a black woman, or having trouble with his Jewish parents or grand parents, or trying to relate to Thurman’s black doorman, or Streep desperately trying to avoid being seen by Thurman and Greenberg as they fly about town.
If your idea of comedy is seeing Streep ducking down behind a bed in a store, pretending to look for a contact lens, then this is the show for you.
Of course while she’s been urging Thurman on, Streep at the same time has been counseling her son against dating an older (and non Jewish) woman, since she believes age and religion compatibility are at the heart of the work you need to do to make the relationship work (nope, in New York, sex and love don’t cut the rug, and nor does having fun or enjoying life together).
It turns out Greenberg’s character fancies himself as a painter – of the kind of naturalistic bland and dull kind you expect in this kind of middle class comedy of manners. It makes all the family arguments about him becoming a painter kind of silly, since he could probably pass as a new age Norman Rockwell, while Thurman’s urging him on, and pushing him into the New York art scene makes you realize that this kind of show still hasn’t caught up with fifty year old modernism, let alone abstract expressionism. It’s as false as a borscht done with cabbage.
In fact, it’s so bad, I don’t mind doing a spoiler, just so this canary can save other miners from a rental deal. Because the clock is ticking, Thurman badly wants a baby, but she’s not so sure about having it with a young man. In the end, with some careful cheating to make it seem like a good idea, she decides she doesn’t want to go the whole ten yards with Greenberg and drops him.
True, Greenberg has had a minor fling in one of the movie’s many ‘will they or won’t they’ get together moments, and true, he keeps strange company, like a mate who throws pies in people’s faces, and true, he’s inclined to be a little untidy. But hey, the reality is this kind of movie is designed for conservatives (just how many Jewish Republicans are there out in the world?) and so there’s no way it’s going to endorse the age gap by having Thurman hunker down with a young stud. So it’s off into the cold, cold snow for the young klutz, after taking a last forlorn look through the glass as his true love hunkers down with her friends …
Hang on, it’s Uma Thurman. Doesn’t anyone in the show notice this? She could hang her heels under many a young stud’s bed, and has enough cash to age pretty gracefully. Oh that’s right, this is a hard core study of intense personal relationships, the quest for independence, and the importance of quality pairing in a Manhattan setting. You mean Streep gets to win, and the son forsakes joy and true love for being a prime ham? Bummer dude.
Well Woody got it right. Go with the young flesh, and have fun, and a pox on this show, which is dull and boring and works all kinds of predictable riffs in a profoundly offensive way. Amazingly it’s got a 6.2 rating on Imdb, proving that Streep has plenty of friends beavering away on her behalf.
From where I sat she’s the Neil Perry of comedy, a limp bit of asparagus devoid of comedy timing, and incapable of generating laughs. It’s hard not to feel sorry for Greenberg and Thurman as they paddle around together in this soggy lettuce, trying as hard as they can to salvage something.
The passengers in the Qantas cabin sat gloomily devouring their stale bread and water, with only an eerie cackle or two from minds who had lost the plot. Now one of the survivors of this traumatic experience stands outside rental stores, stopping one in three, and warning them of the dangers of therapeutic comedies. They send you mad … better a prime turkey than Prime.
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