What could be cuter than two attractive best friends accidentally making an adorably adult-like and pensive love child? It’s likely with that premise in mind that whomever successfully pitched this Jeffrey Eugenides story about a botched insemination was able to
What could be cuter than two attractive best friends accidentally making an adorably adult-like and pensive love child?
It’s likely with that premise in mind that whomever successfully pitched this Jeffrey Eugenides story about a botched insemination was able to get the movie “The Switch” into production.
At times a bit shallow but overall redeemingly cute and light at heart, “The Switch” is a movie that farms the most-likeable characteristics we’ve seen cast members Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman play in numerous other roles and puts them into an amalgamation of humor and anxiety that makes their onscreen lives seem problematic enough for viewers to empathize and identify with.
Wally Mars (Bateman), a stock trader and analyst who dated Kassie Larson (Aniston) a few times but has since been remanded into the dreaded “friend zone,” is a bit insipid and also neurotic.
Kassie, a successful businesswoman in her late 30s wanting a child before it’s too late, announces her plan of inseminating herself, a decision that makes best friend Wally feel left out.
Of course, the reason he feels left out is he is in love with his best friend.
Though this could be a somewhat-rote romantic comedy, throw in the dash of existential panic that’s demonstrated by Aniston’s well-executed sense of her proverbial ticking biological clock and Wally Mars’ morose energy derived from his looming mid-life crisis, and the movie works. Offering a fairly smart, crisp-though-at-times cliché, plotline, “The Switch” consistently redeems itself thanks to the boyish self-effacing charm of Bateman and the down-to-earth mama quality that resonates from Aniston.
Of course, Kassie doesn’t see Wally as anything more than a friend, and although the two have been best buds for more than 13 years, it seems there’s no compelling need for Wally to bite the bullet and confess his love.
That is, of course, until the sperm-donor father (who actually isn’t the father) makes it clear to Wally that he wants to propose to Kassie.
Confused as to what to do — should he tell her the truth about switching the sperm and risk her never forgiving him, or should he postpone the truth-telling a bit longer?
Wally engages in several humorous exchanges with his other best friend, Leonard (Jeff Goldblum), an at-times-irreverent-but-overall-warm-and-caring coworker and confidante, who helps him navigate through this difficult time.
It’s these exchanges that add levity and laughs to the film, as Goldblum champions several one-liners that are intentional understatements, epitomized, for example, in his reaction to Wally’s switching the sperm (“Oh, that’s ill-advised”).
Throughout the film viewers are rooting for Wally and Kassie to get together, though perhaps the more-poignant relationship is the one budding between Wally and his actual son, Sebastian.
Though it takes much of the film time before Wally remembers that he indeed switched the sperm, something he forgot for nearly seven years after taking an herbal supplement given to him by Kassie’s friend, Debbie (Juliette Lewis), when he finally remembers, he does a good job trying to be a father.
It’s within the father-son relationship that the movie retains most of its cuteness, as we see the misanthropic traits of Wally surfacing in Sebastian, and the vulnerabilities that go along with being a parent.
Perhaps ironically, however, it’s those shared qualities that help Wally care for and win over his hard-to-please son. In one such scene, Wally is asked to take care of Sebastian while Kassie is on a romantic getaway with the man whom she thinks is the real sperm donor.
Sebastian has head lice, and it is thanks to the neurotic, compulsive attributes of Wally that everything that has been contaminated is isolated, washed and sterilized.
Upon Kassie’s return, her son is cured and happily enjoying morning pancakes with his biological father.
Overall, “The Switch” is a pleasant-enough flick about seizing opportunity and rising up to any number of the challenges life presents.
