In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week we’re taking a look at Something’s Gotta Give, an A-list rom-com from writer/director Nancy Meyers starring a pair of Hollywood royalty.
Something’s Gotta Give is the kind of A-list rom-com that used to print money in the 90s and early aughts. (Not to mention basically the only thing Hollywood made in the 1930s, but that’s going too deep for this piece.) You put two or three huge megastars in a room together, let them holler at each other and basically play more charming versions of themselves, and that’s pretty much the whole movie. In this case, it’s Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton in a romantic comedy about how May-December relationships are weird and why can’t people just fuck people their own age?
The whole thing has this hastily slapped together feel to it, right down to how they sold it. Just look at the poster. Both actors are top billed, specifically stylized as “Jack & Diane”. And if you’re trying to market your movie to aging baby boomers who still want to pretend they’re in their late 20s, John Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane” is exactly the song you want to evoke here. Which is weird, because not only does that song not figure into the movie at all, but the whole idea of “life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone” only plays a tiny part in this story, and that’s if you’re being generous.
Something’s Gotta Give comes from writer/director Nancy Meyers, a prolific comedy writer who received an Oscar nomination for her first screenplay, Private Benjamin. She followed that up by writing and producing several successful comedies in the 80s and early 90s, before transitioning to directing with 1998’s remake of The Parent Trap. For what it’s worth, Something’s Gotta Give is Meyers’ fourth film with Diane Keaton, following Baby Boom and Father of the Bride parts one and two.
The movie opens on a montage of beautiful young people having a fun evening on the town; drinking, dancing, clubbing it up. The movie is not about any of these people but, rather, the people who desperately want to believe they still are these people. We then meet Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson) and his much younger girlfriend, Marin (Amanda Peet), heading to her mother’s beach house for a weekend of gross sex. Harry wanders into the kitchen half naked just in time to find Marin’s mother, successful Broadway playwright Erica (Diane Keaton), and sister Zoe (Transformers: Dark of the Moon’s Frances McDormand) standing there screaming at him.
After an awkward greeting turns into an awkward family dinner, during which Harry introduces himself as a successful New York rap mogul1, Harry suffers a hilarious heart attack, sending the whole gang to the hospital. There, Erica meets Harry’s doctor, Julian (The Replacements‘ Keanu Reeves), who just happens to be a fan of her work, and is also immediately smitten with her. He confines Harry to bed rest for a couple weeks, and without any family or friends nearby, Harry has no choice but to stay with Erica at her palatial beach estate while she tries to hammer out her next play. He accidentally sees Erica naked, tries like hell to climb a flight of stairs to prove he can still exert himself enough to have sex, and just generally lives as a pest in her home. So begins a love triangle where Harry and Erica play cat and mouse, wearing down one another’s defenses. At the same time, Julian tries his hardest to woo Erica, completely oblivious that Harry is even in the mix at all.
There’s a fun little dynamic at work here, where Harry’s serial philanderer lifestyle gets turned on its ear as he suddenly finds himself developing feelings for Erica. Setting aside the Florence Nightingale effect, which is very much in play but no one ever acknowledges it, Harry is very open about the fact that he only dates women under the age of thirty. Erica balks at Harry’s chauvinist lifestyle, particularly as it concerns her daughter, but doesn’t see any problem with letting Julian take her out on a date. At least, that isn’t why she has a problem with it. She’s initially just skeptical that Julian shows any interest in her at all. What would a young, handsome ER doctor want with a rich, erudite Manhattan playwright thirty years his senior? Is he crazy? Or just… y’know. Weird.
Of course, this coming from Nancy Meyers, the idea of giving Diane Keaton the younger love interest is all part of the film’s game. Too often are older men paired up with much younger women in films like this, so sure, in the interest of fairness, why not pair Keaton with Keanu Reeves? This isn’t the first time Reeves has been asked to exude his natural charm in a rom-com, and it certainly won’t be the last. Julian approaches Erica as a fan of her work, attracted to her mind and personality; that he’s physically attracted to her seems to be icing on the cake, but also something she’s not entirely comfortable because, in the eyes of the movie That’s Weird.
Harry, on the other hand, is given no such consideration with regard to his attraction to Marin. She’s just the pretty young thing he happens to be in bed with this week, and everything else is happenstance. So Harry and Erica find themselves meeting in the middle, romantically speaking. He finds himself more willing to open up emotionally around her and get to know her as a person, while she seems more willing to tolerate his presence at all, as he’s the more age-appropriate love interest. (I also can’t escape the idea that Julian is maybe just a little bit of a starfucker, and is only interested in Erica for the clout of having made it with a minor celebrity? But again, the film doesn’t explicitly go there.)
This is also, ultimately, a romantic comedy for baby boomers in 2003. Folks entering their sixties want to see stories about people their own age learning how to enjoy retirement and getting over their midlife crisis impulse to sleep with younger anything. And in that respect, the movie succeeds. It helps that Keaton and Nicholson are very good together. Both of them exude an effortless, old-school Hollywood kind of charm. Nicholson knows exactly how to ride the fine line between class and sleaze. The back and forth between him and Keaton feels so genuine that the details surrounding them don’t really matter that much.
Of course there’s the third-act misunderstanding where Harry, finally allowed to return home, goes back to his womanizing ways, where Erica wanders into a restaurant and finds him once again on a date with a much younger woman. Coupled with her ex-husband announcing he’s marrying a woman their daughter’s age, Erica goes on a screaming, crying bender where she pounds out her next play in one big huff. This play, as it turns out, is basically the story of the film up to this point, featuring a song and dance routine (that we never get to see) of ten Harrys dancing in hospital gowns and bare asses, and eventually ending with Harry’s (apparently hilarious) death. Kinda feels like a cheat that we didn’t get to see any of this actual play, but boomers in 2003 weren’t ready for that level of meta-humor.
Ultimately? Something’s Gotta Give is fine. Good, even. I’m not the target audience for a film like this, and likely won’t be for at least another twenty years. Maybe in 2043 this’ll get a critical reappraisal, though I doubt it. Folks liked it well enough in 2003; Diane Keaton landed an Oscar nomination for her role2. Worldwide, the film made $265 million at the box office, falling just shy of the top ten for the year3. Near as I can tell, it’s been remembered fondly, enough so that Nancy Meyers basically made the movie again six years later with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin in It’s Complicated. Different details, I’m sure, but the formula still works, so why mess with a hit?
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
Favs is back to being a bit player in someone else’s project. And like I’ve said several times before, it’s a role he can play with his eyes closed. He plays Nicholson’s personal assistant, floating in for two or three scenes as your typical entertainment industry busybody, and floating back out without really registering. Which is fine. This isn’t his movie to steal. It’s the kind of role any actor would gladly take just to spend a few minutes with Hollywood royalty. Can’t blame him for that.
FINAL RATING
3 stars (out of 5). S’okay.
NEXT TIME: Sports!
- Drive By Records is his label, which is exactly what an old white person who knows nothing about hip-hop would name a record label. Then again, this was a joke in 2003. In 2022, someone did try to start a label by that name, but according to this trademark history website, it went defunct in 2024.
↩︎ - I’m willing to bet it was the screaming and crying at her computer that did it. It’s a powerful sequence where a woman who built herself up to be above things like feelings suddenly has a lot of them all at once.
↩︎ - It was just edged out of the top ten by Bad Boys II. ↩︎
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