In Jennifer Westfeldt’s directorial debut, she and friend Adam Scott heed the ticking of their biological clocks and decide to have a baby, but not the relationship that comes with it. Some of their friends (Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig) are unhappily coupled, others (Maya Rudolph and Chris O'Dowd) have thrown themselves into parenting whole-hog, but none of them are as they were, which, from where the expecting couple sit, is a fate worse than (spiritual) death. "We don't know those people," Scott muses. "Those people are mean and angry."
Westfeldt, who wrote and starred in Kissing Jessica Stein, works several balancing acts at once, mixing a sitcom premise with emotionally fraught realizations and adding depth, but not too much, to the burgeoning cinema of arrested development. She sympathizes with her characters' unwillingness to surrender their carefully wrought selves at the same time as she lays bare their narcissism. Their post-co-parenting arcs, with Westfeldt feeling the pull of maternal instinct and Scott getting busy with Megan Fox, are a hair too chromosomally determined, but the movie's killer last line makes the most of its biological imperatives.
