Prime review

When writer/director Ben Younger conceived of a plot in which a woman unknowingly dates her therapist's son, he realized therein lay the potential for much hilarity. The resulting Prime, however, never fully exploits the entangled scenario, with the outcome being less comedy gold and more comedy bronze.

Younger, whose past credits include the far more accomplished Boiler Room, is so consumed with the machinations of plotting that he neglects the more crucial element of creating rounded characters with which to weave his tangled web. Only the redoubtable Meryl Streep as Lisa Metzger, the therapist and controlling mother, rings true.

Neither Uma Thurman as the recently divorced 37 year-old photography producer Rafi or Bryan Greenberg as the aspiring painter David Bloomberg, 14 years her junior, are able to add much depth to their cursorily drawn roles. Both characters are more symbolic than real, comprised as they are of a shopping list of clichés to define their respective ages and positions. That there is little to link the ill-matched pairing is evinced by Thurman and Greenberg's complete lack of chemistry.

Alongside mining the situation for laughs, which it achieves all too rarely, Prime attempts to delve into the ethical and emotional consequences of the triangular relationship between Rafi, David and Lisa, but does so only superficially. It lacks the courage or insight to go deeply. Indeed the potentially explosive moment of realization, when Lisa finally determines it is her precious son who is at the center of Rafi's explicit sexual revelations, is wasted. And later, when Rafi in abject humiliation declares, "Your mother now knows intimate details," David's glib response is, "Well, she better not use that to get me home for thanksgiving."

With an amateurish, self-conscious feel, Prime lurches clumsily from one dilemma to the next. Too much is stated rather than infused. Leaving a few canvasses around his apartment does not make David an artist. Certainly not one that's believable. It's symptomatic of a film which does very little to convincingly substantiate the world it offers. Shortly after they meet, Rafi's efforts to determine David's true age are met with juvenile attempts at humour. "Are you being evasive?" she asks. "I'm trying," he counters. The same could be said of Prime.

Kevin Murphy