“Friends with Kids” (now on DVD), one of those movies with a premise much better than its execution, has a great jumping-off point: Pals Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt, who also wrote and directed) and Jason (Adam Scott of “Parks and Recreation”) are happily single, whereas their married friends with kids (Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig, and Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd) are tired and miserable.
We get an opening shot of rowdy kids in a nice restaurant, with our six main characters disgusted that anyone would bring their misbehaving children there. Then two of the couples have kids, and we see how they are exhausted, they regularly snap at each other, and they have no time for their friends. We’ve all seen that in real life, and indeed, Julie and Jason believe they have dodged a bullet.
But “Friends with Kids” — which, inexplicably, forgets to add any notable scenes of the happiness that comes from having children — needs to fill out the rest of its running time, and this is where things get wildly off track. And I don’t think I’m bringing too much of my anti-having-kids bias to the table.
First of all, Scott and Westfeldt — as longtime best buds — have no chemistry. Now, that’s fine in a way, because — as lines of dialogue remind us on multiple occasions, they don’t find each other physically attractive. But here’s the problem: I didn’t believe Jason and Julie’s friendship, either. That’s partly because I’ve been conditioned by movies to understand that any male and female “friends” will realize they are meant to be together in 90 to 120 minutes of screen time. In a way, “Friends with Kids” is refreshing in that it doesn’t play things that obviously; on the other hand, it thinks just having friends tell each other how physically unattractive they are works as a new movie shorthand for a male-female friendship. That’s weak writing, and also: Friends don’t talk to each other like that.
I also didn’t believe it for a second when Jason and Julie decide they want a kid (which they bring about through an awkwardly technical session of sex that might’ve been shocking 20 years ago but is now par for the course in comedies). Small moments of humor come about in the kid section of the movie (sorry, I forgot the plot device’s — I mean, kid’s — name), such as when Jason’s girlfriend (played by Megan Fox, who doesn’t seem gettable by Jason, even in Movie Reality) walks in on Jason covered in his baby’s explosive diarrhea.
As the watchable but never-quite-believable “Friends with Kids” wound down, the friend I was watching it with suggested a $10 bet. He took the side that Jason and Julie would get together in the end. I, focused on the lack of chemistry rather than movie-script logic, guessed that they wouldn’t get together — if there’s no attraction, there’s no attraction; it’s sad, but it’s reality. We were both kind of right: Suffice it to say that the film’s conclusion doesn’t ring true.
The movie’s poster best explains what writer-director-actor Westfeldt was aiming for, as it allows people to pick two of three options: Love, happiness or kids — the idea being that you can maybe have two, but not all three. Perhaps inadvertently, the film stands by that claim: The script tries to put characters in the position of having all three, but I never once believed it on screen.
So while it’s not awful (in fact, I gotta add that the New York City settings look great), it doesn’t live up to its ambitions, either. Whether looking for laughs or an examination of relationships, families, happiness and the ways they intertwine, “Friends with Kids” is like those loud kids in the restaurant: Briefly interesting to analyze, but ultimately just a bunch of noise.