The Modern Family on 'Friends With Kids'

What if parents refused the vexations of modern marriage—and of cohabitation, for that matter? Jennifer Westfeldt’s dark confection suggests one answer: They’d drive other couples mad with envy

JoJo Whilden

If Jennifer Westfeldt isn't an instantly recognizable name, she's about to be, thanks to Friends With Kids, her star-­studded directorial debut and the best film she's written and appeared in yet. Over the past decade, this actress-screenwriter has been quietly going from strength to strength, starting with the playful 2001 ­indie breakout Kissing Jessica Stein (which she wrote and starred in) and, five years later, the grittier Ira & Abby. Except for a stint on FOX's 24, her work in film and television is nearly always about love in the long term, and whether it's buoyant comedy or something closer to the bone, it's never sentimental.

Just the title Friends With Kids sounds innocuous to the point of boredom, yet the movie is anything but. Westfeldt isn't a ­romance writer; she's what you could call an anatomist of the heart, opening it right up and looking at the fatty bits that can kill you. In this ­movie, she gives herself plenty to work with. The story begins as three exuberant, carefree couples are meeting for dinner in a downtown Manhattan boîte. Two are married—Maya ­Rudolph's Leslie to Chris O'Dowd's Alex, and Kristen Wiig's Missy to Jon Hamm's Ben. The third pair, ­Julie and ­Jason (Westfeldt and Adam Scott), live in the same apartment building and are best friends, so close that they enjoy chatting on the phone late at night while their one-night stands snore peacefully away. When Missy and Ben ­return from a suspiciously lengthy visit to the restaurant loo looking like they've just had sex, Leslie trumps everybody by ­announcing that she and Alex are going to have a baby.

The way Westfeldt plays with the all-too-familiar tropes of a hundred lazy rom-coms is one of her best tricks. So when the story leaps ahead four years to a birthday party for Jason at ­Leslie and Alex's apartment, we're primed to see some cute kids, including the two that ­Missy and Ben have produced. But we barely ­notice them because their freaked-out ­parents hog the show. Leslie is in a snarling rage at her ­amiable husband's failure to help clean up the kiddie chaos before the guests arrive, while Ben and Missy come through the door snapping at each other like a pair of ­angry turtles. There's black humor in some of this, but mostly it's just transfixing. Other people's bad behavior always is. Just think of the ugliest thing you've ever said to a lover, or, if you want to get oedipal, the brink-of-divorce horror shows that fed-up parents perform at night when they think the kids are asleep.

The impressively dark threads that run through this clever ­revisionist comedy have a destabilizing power. Westfeldt is showing us an aspect of contemporary love and attachment that throws the whole thing into doubt. Her timing could hardly be sharper: A recent analysis of the latest U.S. Census Bureau data found that in 2010 only 51 percent of Americans 18 and older were presently married, compared with 72 percent in 1960. Hey, why get so close that it makes you simultaneously claustrophobic and clingy? Does the nuclear family work at all?

These are the questions that drive Julie and Jason's decision to have the child they both want but not a marriage or a household. Given their proximity, this seems to work just fine, much to the envy and barely suppressed disapproval of their friends. And yes, the kid is not only irresistible, he makes possible a poop joke that puts the one in Bridesmaids to shame.

The twists and turns of the couple's unorthodox arrangements become the central focus of Friends With Kids and shouldn't be ­given away in a review. Suffice it to say that a few unex­pected guests ­enter the equation in the person of Megan Fox's drily ­humorous and highly independent Broadway gypsy, followed by Edward Burns' ravishing, low-key potential superhusband.

Like the best actor-directors, Westfeldt gets adventurous work from her fine cast, showing some of the most popular of them in guises so unlikely that you feel shocked when you recognize them. The bubbly Rudolph as a harridan from hell? Funny-girl Wiig a heartbreaking figure? And most memorable of all, Hamm (Westfeldt's longtime companion offscreen) as a man so bilious and ­arrogant that when, with a tight and poisonous grin, he delivers a scathing denunciation of his ­supposed friends, you half expect to see a swarm of killer bees fly out of his mouth? But never mind. That would be fantasy, and the movie's biggest surprise is that Westfeldt is dealing in fact.

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