Friends With Kids ☆☆☆½

This film is a real treat. ENTIRELY predictable but much like Friends With Benefits it is done so well that you don't mind that the lives, loves and relationships are following a plot as old as time...well OK so the beginning isn't so conventional but by the end it gets there.

The plot follows a group of friends living in Manhattan: a (I presumed) married couple played by Maya Rudolph (Away We Go) and Chris O'Dowd (IT Crowd); another (completely all over each other) couple played by Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm (Bridesmaids), and finally best friends Adam Scott (from the AMAZING series Party Down) and Jennifer Westfeldt, the writer and director of this movie (and partner of Mr Hamm).

It begins in a restaurant where Rudolph and O'Dowd, after their single friends complain about a small person making noise and the terrible parents for bringing a child into a fancy restaurant, announce they are expecting. Cut to four years later, their friends live in Brooklyn, and Westfeldt and Scott have to take $50 cab rides to get to their houses because dinner does not happen in restaurants but at peoples homes where they can keep an eye on the kids.
Hamm and Wiig have become this bitter couple who snipe at each other where they used to never stop kissing, most likely due to the lack of sleep from their newborn. Basically, they aren't happy at all.

O'Dowd and Rudolph are entirely stressed, not sniping but yelling at each other, but then they also have not slept and are expecting their second child. All in all what Westfeldt and Scott see are two stressed out couples trying to raise children and decide, after a lot of discussion of the pros and cons of raising a child as friends, to have a baby of their own without being a couple, splitting the responsibility down the middle.

Quite refreshingly this film goes from the conception (an awkward but weirdly lovely 'drunk' night of sex) to the birth, and then follows on nicely with Scott and Westfeldt making their lives work. Until Scott meets a young dancer played by Megan Fox (Transformers) and Westfeldt meets a divorcee with kids of his own, played by Edward Burns (27 Dresses).

The relationships move and evolve, their friends have huge arguments and break-up, and the situation that Scott and Westfeldt in moves from happy to miserable. Don't worry though, as I said at the start, entirely predictable to the end.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film despite the predictable nature of the story, but then sometimes a story told well is good enough. [This is my main complaint with films such as Avatar: I find it mundane because the story, though accompanied by some beautiful graphics, is a classic tale of lovers from different sides of the track, but it is lost among the self-congratulatory special effects and unimaginative quest for 'unobtanium'.]

The cast are fantastic: Wiig and Hamm are scarily believable as the couple who's relationship becomes so sour it could curdle milk; Rudolph and O'Dowd are lovely, also believable as the couple who fight but love each other enough to get through it, and O'Dowd has a fairly impressive New York accent (at least that was the drawl it reminded me of most).

Adam Scott - I have been slightly in love with his strange face since I became addicted to the short-lived series Party Down (though IMDB is teasing me with a film version being in 'pre-production'). He displays a more sensitive side with his portrayal of Jason in this movie which is really sweet and makes your heart melt just a little, even if the language accompanying the tender moment is not quite what the traditional romantic comedy normally would use.
The language is of course due to Jennifer Westfeldt who does a really good job with the script and direction. She has quite a sharp wit and makes use of colourful language but not in a perverse way, as in it is not used to shock the viewer, it is simply just the way we talk now. This is also Westfeldt's first turn in the directors chair and I have to say I can't really fault the direction, it is held together really well and does not dwell on one couple at the expense of the others.

What is important about this film is the believability of it. I can imagine that people who are in their mid to late thirties consider having children with their friends if not in relationships themselves, and perhaps it could work. Of course the overriding romance of this story is that the best friends are actually in love with one another, and the romantic in me adores this. The realist says that if this were to happen in real life it would most likely end in disaster no matter the romantic notion that just loving and wanting the child is enough to make such an arrangement work.


Nevertheless, this is a story about family well-told by all, from the writer to the cast. It is sweet, funny, and boasts some realism. It is interesting that Westfeldt has no children of her own to be able to write so well about the stresses of child-rearing, but perhaps she has observed enough from her own friends to be able to comment. You might be wondering why I only gave it three and a half stars and that is because though I enjoyed it greatly, I cannot rank it as highly as I have The Five Year Engagement.

Above-all, this film is a romance. And I'm a sucker for a well-told romance with some kind of happy ending.