‘Prime’: right ingredients, wrong recipe
In “The Manchurian Candidate,” Meryl Streep portrayed a cold, scheming villainess who uses her son as a pawn in a political assassination plot.
The Oscar-winning actress is cast as another manipulative matriarch in “Prime,” playing a psychologist with a compulsion to control her son’s love life. She smothers him with Jewish guilt when she learns that his new girlfriend is of a different faith. Her anxiety intensifies after she realizes that the woman in question is one of her patients.
Streep makes a convincing transformation into a yenta, but her performance doesn’t quite mesh with the rest of the film. Her broad portrayal of the mother from hell worked well within the satirical context of “Manchurian Candidate,” but in this modest romantic comedy, her depiction rings too shrill.
Writer-director Ben Younger (“Boiler Room”) creates a wildly uneven picture that is confused at its core. The viewing experience is frustrating because the audience can see that the right ingredients are present but the recipe seems to have gone missing along the way.
The combined talents of the lead performers – Streep, Uma Thurman and newcomer Bryan Greenberg – make the film watchable. Still, their work doesn’t resolve the story’s inconsistencies.
Rafi (Thurman) is a 37-year-old New York divorcee in counseling with Lisa (Streep), discussing the aftermath of her failed marriage. Streep and Thurman have a good dynamic even if their therapist-patient dialogue is questionable. Lisa tells her client what to do rather than asking questions crafted to help the patient make her own decisions.
Lisa’s son, David (Greenberg, featured in the HBO series “Unscripted”), is a struggling artist with a sharp sense of humor and a host of neuroses, many of them rooting back to memories of an elderly relative, Bubi. He is convinced he’s to blame for her death, since she died days after he announced that he was dating a black woman and planned to pursue a career as an artist.
David and Rafi first encounter each other at an art-house theater during a Michelangelo Antonioni marathon. Although Rafi suspects that her suitor is a few years younger, she is shocked to hear he is 23 and suggests they part ways. The naive David persists, undaunted by the fact that Rafi is an older woman on the rebound.
When Rafi first tells Lisa about her new beau, the therapist encourages her to explore the relationship. A monstrous conflict of interest manifests after Lisa realizes that her patient is dating her son. Instead of behaving like an ethical professional and referring Rafi to another psychologist, Lisa betrays her client and her child. She passive-aggressively seeks to sabotage the romance, doling out bad advice to her patient.
The screwball content undermines the film’s scattered moments of emotional honesty. Some scenes have the bittersweet candor of “Annie Hall,” while others play like lame sitcom vignettes.