Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contributes their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to cinapse.twocents@gmail.com.
The Pick: Something’s Gotta Give (2003)
We here at Two Cents have decided to start the year off by paying tribute to one of the greatest actresses of her generation, Diane Keaton, on her birthday month. Since passing away last October at the age of 79, many have left countless tributes to the indelible mark the actress left behind through a collection of memorable roles and performances. Cinapse recently paid tribute to the recently departed actress twice in pieces honoring her 21st century work and her directing efforts. However, Two Cents has decided to venture back and revisit classic Diane Keaton through a series of titles that helped to make the Oscar-winning actress a truly one-of-a-kind performer.
The year 1996 was an especially good one to be Diane Keaton. The Oscar-winning actress had struck box-office gold with The First Wives Club and had scored her third Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for the drama Marvin’s Room. Professionally and creatively, Keaton couldn’t have asked for a better place to be in.
But for some reason, the momentum didn’t last. For the next several years, Keaton found herself alternating between low-profile indies and made-for-TV movies. When the actress did appear on the big screen in wide releases, the results weren’t always so plentiful. The Other Sister from 1999 was a poorly thought-out venture, while 2000’s Hanging Up did offer her some solid on-screen moments. But the actress was understandably more focused as the director of that film to give full attention to her character. Meanwhile, 2001’s Town & Country was a certified bomb that did nothing for the careers of Keaton and co-stars Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn.
How lucky she was to have the script for Something’s Gotta Give presented to her by former collaborator Nancy Meyers. The role of Erica Barry, a divorced playwright who finds herself falling for a notorious ladies’ man (Jack Nicholson), was tailor-made for the star. Even though the studio behind the movie thought her and leading man Nicholson were too old for the roles, they surprised them all with a movie that was not only acclaimed (Keaton scored her fourth Oscar nomination for the role), but also made big money, certifying the actress as one of the greats who could not be dismissed. Over two decades later, the romantic comedy is an indisputable classic, which continues to be embraced by movie lovers of all ages.
Diane Keaton plays Erica Barry, an accomplished writer who reluctantly falls for her daughter’s older playboy boyfriend in this brilliant Nancy Meyers-directed romantic comedy. Keaton is indeed as sensational as her Academy Award nomination would have you believe, from the very beginning, where she enters her own beachside home, surprised fully by the presence of Jack Nicholson, oddly in her kitchen. A part like Erica in this film is a blessing for any actress, so Keaton getting to play this part and do so fabulously is as pleasurable as cinema watching can get.
The comedic moments throughout are fantastic to experience Keaton in, ranging from the subtle in the disapproving facial reactions she throws towards Nicholson’s Harry, how she loudly covers herself up during an awkward late-night naked interaction with him, or hell, even just the way Erica works on a laptop. Keaton is just masterful in this romance, delivering one of the most defining parts of her career, which, coming after three decades of steadily working, is an impressive feat.
Keaton also nails the humanity of Erica, portraying a genuine vulnerability that you, the audience, are utterly moved by throughout. Keaton’s face communicates much of Erica’s struggle, from at first being trepidatious of Harry to later falling for the Playboy fully. The film is almost an emotional rollercoaster for Keaton, and she makes it all so straightforward and tangible for the audience watching. When she expresses herself emotionally, it feels right and simply magnificent.
The film leans into expectations of Keaton as an actress even including her through a comedic tour de force of tears trying her best to write her new play. It’s moments like this and other outlandish physical reactions that highlight Keaton’s great knack for physical comedy and how hers ranks amongst cinema’s greatest physical performers.
In cinema, dream logic is most often associated with filmmakers like Dario Argento or David Lynch—artists who use fractured narrative, heightened symbolism, and emotional overdetermination to place the viewer inside a psychological state rather than a realistic one. Their films don’t explain themselves; they wash over you. You feel them first, and only later do you try to make sense of what you experienced.
Nancy Meyers, I would argue, works in dream logic too—just filtered through linen pants, oceanfront homes, and the soothing hum of upper-class competence. Her films are Xanax/Red Wine Dream Logic Cinema. They don’t obey realism so much as emotional wish-fulfillment. They exist in a heightened reality where feelings are processed through immaculate kitchens, oversized sweaters, and people who always seem to have time to talk things out. It’s not surrealism—it’s sedating comfort as an aesthetic, anxiety smoothed into something livable.
The definitive Nancy Meyers film for me is Something’s Gotta Give, and that’s largely because of Diane Keaton’s Oscar-nominated performance as Erica Barry—Nancy Meyers’ audience avatar, alter ego, and emotional anchor. If Nancy Meyers is a sentient turtleneck sweater, or an Instagram aesthetic given human form, then Diane Keaton is the soul animating it.
Something’s Gotta Give follows Jack Nicholson as Harry Sanborn, an aging bachelor and hip-hop mogul (???) who exclusively dates women under thirty. He’s currently seeing Amanda Peet, who brings him to her mother’s Hamptons house for a weekend getaway. Her mother, Erica Barry (Keaton), is a successful playwright—single, accomplished, neurotic, and deeply uninterested, if not outright disgusted, by this man.
Almost immediately, Harry has a heart attack before sex, forcing him to convalesce in Erica’s pristine, beachy home. A doctor is called. That doctor is an extremely handsome Keanu Reeves. From there, the film becomes a series of escalating emotional entanglements, humiliations, romantic awakenings, and deeply questionable logistics that somehow feel… right by the end. The plot mechanics are fully deranged and completely delightful. This is a movie that opens with Crazy Town’s “Butterfly” and ends with an accordion rendition of “La Vie En Rose.” You either accept the wavelength or you don’t—but if you do, it’s bliss.
Nancy Meyers has long been criticized for her fixation on beige, her impossibly expensive kitchens, and her aggressively curated environments. This is a kind of criticism that would never be levied at Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, or Michael Mann for their exacting visual control. Meyers is, in many ways, the Michael Mann of beige. She thinks clearly about everything. Her films are precise acts of self-expression. She has a distinct auteurist vision that is often dismissed because it seems easy—but if it’s so easy, why can’t anyone replicate it?
Making a Nancy Meyers movie is like making a soufflé. It looks light and airy. It feels effortless. But it’s deceptively complicated (It’s Complicated, even). Cozy Cinema—especially coastal-grandmother-chic Cozy Cinema—requires total control of tone. One wrong note and the whole thing collapses.
One of my favorite pieces of film criticism is Allison Willmore’s reading of Top Gun: Maverick as a death dream. I’d like to suggest something similar here: Something’s Gotta Give can be read as a kind of purgatory fantasy for Harry Sanborn—a soft, sunlit afterlife designed to teach him to love and respect women his own age.
The Hamptons function as purgatory: bright, airy, suspended from real time. Keanu Reeves’ doctor is a literal angel—beautiful, kind, impossibly attentive. He loves Erica’s plays (“I saw the last one twice”). He buys her flowers “to give him to apologize.” He reads a play about her affair with Harry and tells her, sincerely: “This is the best thing you’ve ever written.” He is a sweet baby angel dreamboat who does not exist in any recognizable reality.
Harry, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to do any actual work. He drifts. He revisits women he has wronged. He confronts the emptiness of his patterns. He is forced—gently, kindly—to sit with the consequences of who he has been. If this is purgatory, it is the kind only Nancy Meyers would design: one with ocean views, soft lighting, and emotional growth as the ultimate penance.
But as much as this is Harry’s reckoning, Something’s Gotta Give is Diane Keaton’s movie through and through. Erica Barry is a deceptively rich character: a perfect synthesis of Meyers’ worldview and Keaton’s screen persona. She is a collection of neuroses. She is funny, elegant, and confidently single. She cries hard. She loves deeply. She is successful and still afraid she’s unlovable. Her performance carries the weight of lived experience, humor sharpened by vulnerability, and a sense that this woman has earned every inch of her emotional life.
In revisiting Something’s Gotta Give for Two Cents, what lingers isn’t just the fantasy, but the generosity of its emotional worldview. Diane Keaton left behind an eclectic, deeply impressive body of work, full of risk, reinvention, and iconography. But her collaborations with Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer—Baby Boom, Father of the Bride, and Something’s Gotta Give—feel like the spine of her later career, defining how she aged on screen from the ’90s through the final chapters of her life. These films allowed her to be romantic without apology, neurotic without diminishment, and powerful without hardness. They treated her not as a punchline or a relic, but as a movie star whose interior life mattered.
In one of Something’s Gotta Give’s most perfect moments, Jack Nicholson describes Erica Barry as “flinty, impervious, and formidable.” Diane Keaton was all of that—and unlike any other screen presence we knew.
Taking in four new-to-me, Cinapse-team-curated Diane Keaton films was a delightful exercise for me in exploring titles I wouldn’t normally prioritize. It is our hope to draw attention to the legendary Keaton, paying homage to her legacy after her recent departure from this mortal coil. I know that I personally enjoyed this journey and do feel that I have a better sense of who she was as a talent and screen legend.
And while I’m glad we experienced Looking For Mr. Goodbar and Reds, it was Baby Boom and this week’s Something’s Gotta Give that most resembled the late-career Keaton that I was more familiar with. Although a younger version of myself probably would have had zero interest in either, modern me was quite charmed by these Nancy Meyers-penned romantic comedies that feel like they hew a little closer to grounded reality than many zany comedies of similar ilk.
While Baby Boom had a real “can women really have it all?” 1980s feel to it, Something’s Gotta Give offers another empowering central lead in Keaton’s Erica Barry, a successful and talented playwright who is afforded the opportunity to choose between two suitors who are smitten with her for all the right reasons. She is, “a woman to love”, after all. There’s not a lot of depth to Something’s Gotta Give, but there are frank conversations about love, age, dating, and sex. It’s a very movie-like set-up, with Jack Nicholson dating Keaton’s younger daughter (Amanda Peet), having a heart attack, and connecting with seaside Doctor Keanu Reeves, who ultimately falls for Keaton at the same time that Nicholson is re-thinking his pursuit of younger ladies.
What I couldn’t help was simply being entertained by this all-star cast from a queen of the romantic comedy subgenre in writer/director Meyers. It’s got some wish-fulfillment stuff in there, is extremely white and upper-class, but it’s easy to love Keaton’s many charms and enjoyable to see all the other characters in her orbit appreciate and love her while watching adults make important choices to grow and change in entertaining ways. I don’t think I’m all the sudden a romantic comedy guy, but amidst today’s challenging world, a little female uplifting wish fulfillment cinema featuring people growing up and making changes, one could do a lot worse than Something’s Gotta Give.
While not among the Nancy Meyers films I watch at least once every two years – that’s The Holiday and The Parent Trap – this Diane Keaton-Jack Nicholson romcom from 2003 is still a hoot, albeit something of a dated one. Jon Favreau appears as a supporting character in this film released the same year as his eventual holiday classic Elf! Plus Something’s Gotta Give is from the glory days of the distinct Nancy Meyers’ kitchen.
Playwright Erica (Keaton) owns a spotless beach house in the Hamptons, where she and her sister (Frances McDormand) coincidentally run into her daughter Marin (Amanda Peet, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip), and her daughter’s much older boyfriend Harry (Nicholson). Before the May-December couple can fully consummate their relationship, Harry has a heart attack and ends up staying weeks longer at Erica’s house, interrupting her writing time. Meanwhile, Keanu Reeves plays Harry’s thirty-something doctor who becomes besotted with Erica (and rightly so).
As with other films for our theme this month, Keaton’s immense talent is on display here. The montage of her crying while writing her script never fails to crack me up. She shares a sparking chemistry with the younger Reeves. Both she and Nicholson display a tender vulnerability as their characters fall for each other. Something’s Gotta Give is a work that doesn’t shy from celebrating older bodies and showing older women, especially, as sexual beings with desires (and persons to be desired).
While the pacing tends to drag in the last act, the comedy doesn’t hit any wrong notes. Hans Zimmer’s French-inspired scoring for Something’s Gotta Give may not be as memorable as that for The Holiday, but it – along with the songs in the soundtrack – perfectly complements the onscreen action. And the story and film by Meyers allows the lead actress to shine.
Something’s Gotta Give was the true surprise of the 2003 movie season. In a year that also included the likes of Finding Nemo and Mystic River, Meyers second time in the director’s chair was a revelation. After years of penning award-winning screenplays, the writer/director had scored big with her directorial debut, 2000’s What Women Want. But that movie felt more like a vehicle for its star Mel Gibson, rather than Meyers’ chance to shine without her former husband and collaborator Charles Shyer. It’s because of this that, despite its cozy beachfront surroundings, Something’s Gotta Give feels totally genuine.
The movie opens with Keaton as Erica Barry, a woman who has long since broken free from a marriage that didn’t work and has spent what we can only assume to be a not insignificant amount of time finding herself by making a career as a playwright that’s based solely on her own voice. It has so often been said that Meyers’ films do retain a fantasy element when it comes to the later in life opportunities that she presents her characters with, a notion which she herself has not disputed. Something’s Gotta Give is the movie that first implanted that idea with the character of Harry Sanborne (brilliantly played by Nicholson), the infamous lothario who, after years of chasing younger women, now finds himself taken by Erica, who in turn, is intrigued by him and the handsome younger doctor (Keanu Reeves) who also has his sights set on her. It’s a fantasy, yes, and not reflective of reality on the whole. But damn it, fantasies need to exist somewhere!
I’m convinced that no part of Something’s Gotta Give would work without Keaton. Maybe it’s because Meyers knows her as well as she does, and maybe it’s because she’s an incredibly gifted actress, but there’s literally no one else who could have brought Erica to life. The role plays to so many of Keaton’s strengths, especially her penchant for comedy, both in terms of wordplay and physical slapstick. No one who has ever seen Something’s Gotta Give will ever forget her character’s hilarious reaction when Harry accidentally sees Erica naked, or the priceless sequence of tears that come nonstop following their eventual parting.
But Keaton also excels at the movie’s more pensive and human moments, where Erica is forced, through Harry’s eyes, to see herself in a way she hadn’t for some time. “I can’t figure out if you hate me, or…if you’re like the only one who’s ever really got me,” she tells him at one point. “I don’t hate you,” is his reply. What makes the performance work is that Keaton recognizes Erica as a woman who is settled and content when we meet her, but then finds there’s more for her on the horizon in terms of romance and in terms of her own personal fulfillment. Yes, this is a love story, and one which gives Erica a well-deserved happy ending. But that isn’t her ultimate victory so much as being able to reinvestigate and reawaken those parts of herself she’d been putting to the side for so long, allowing her to finally discover the woman she was always waiting to be.
