While watching ""In the Land of Women,"" two things become abundantly clear: 1) Adam Brody is one of those highly-underrated up-and-comers that has wasted way too much time on ""The O.C."" and 2) His performance is one of the only things that saves such a daft and schmultzy movie from utter failure.
The movie isn't bad. It's definitely not good, but it's far from bad. More than anything, it is Jon Kasdan's script, suffering from the plague of missed opportunities, which kills it. So many things are glossed over, left hanging or ignored completely, which is odd, because it's not like the movie suffers from length issues.
It seems that Kasdan, a no-name actor from a bunch of no-name movies, was so excited about writing his first script that he completely forgot about plot. Instead, it's just one conversation after another, and it gets a little redundant. There are only two movies that work with the one-long-conversation premise: ""Before Sunrise"" and ""Before Sunset.""
It appears that Kasdan really wanted to take this idea and roll with it, but his product is mushy and, at times, just plain awkward. Not even its cast, one comprised of great talent both old and new, could muster the impact to save it, but they tried very hard and that makes it okay.
The story is simple, sort of clichAc, but not entirely dispensable. Adam Brody plays Carter Webb, an L.A. native who writes screenplays for soft core porn movies. When his girlfriend, popular actress Sofia Bunuel (Elena Anaya), breaks up with him for unknown reasons, Carter decides he needs to regroup. So, he moves to Detroit to take care of his hypochondriac grandmother (Olympia Dukakis) and work on the novel he's been planning for 10 years.
When he gets there, he meets Sarah Hardwick (Meg Ryan), the lonely housewife from down the street. They like to take long walks around the neighborhood and talk. And talk. And talk some more. It turns out that Sarah has a slew of her own insecurities: Her husband is having an affair, her daughter hates her guts for no reason, her days feel unfulfilled and she may be about to start a long battle with breast cancer.
Eventually, Carter meets Sarah's daughters, troubled teen Lucy (Kristen Stewart) and precocious pre-teen Paige (Makenzie Vega). The movie then moves into a whirlwind of chick conversation as Carter finds himself, quite literally ""In the Land of Women."" Lucy, Paige, Sarah and grandma all dump their problems on him with regular frequency, teach him to be a better listener, and then a couple of other things happen along the way.
The trailer for ""In the Land of Women"" is very misleading. So is the movie poster. This film is anything but a romantic dramedy. It's not about young love or new love. It's about Carter finding himself through the sometimes comic, often dramatic plights of the women around him. This is where the script loses its way.
Perhaps Kasdan really wanted it to be a movie about romance but changed his mind halfway through. Either way, Adam Brody is brilliant. His comic timing is something to be envied, and even when all else fails, there's always that one, tiny insignificant detail: He's pretty cute.
If there's any reason this movie works at all, it's Adam Brody. No other actor could have made living ""In the Land of Women"" look so strenuous and yet so blissful at the same time.
