The Switch (2010)

When I saw the trailer for The Switch, my first thought was: didn’t I just see this movie? With Jennifer Lopez? Then I realized that, no, that was a totally different romantic comedy centered on a lonely woman finding love through artificial insemination. Apparently, Hollywood thinks that we need two of its kind (three, if you add The Kids Are All Right to the sperm bank movie bank) in one viewing season. They’re wrong.

This time around, it’s television executive Kassie (Jennifer Aniston), who has had it with trying to find true love and decides to take the sperm by the horns. When she tells her best friend, neurotic equities analyst, Wally (Jason Bateman), he is resistant to the idea. You see, they dated several years ago before he and his peculiar habits were banished to the friend zone. Because he’s still in love with her–a fact that everyone can see but him–he’s hurt that not only does she not want to date him, she doesn’t even want his special sauce. She’s decided instead to hit up Craigslist in search of Mr. Right Seed.

Kassie finds him in a tall Feminist Lit-teaching blond named Roland (Patrick Wilson). She throws an insemination party, complete with confetti sperm and fertility goddess statues, to fete the occasion where Roland leaves his donation in an upstairs bathroom. But drunk Wally accidentally spills the original contribution in the sink and secretly replaces it with his own crystals. Let’s see if anyone notices the difference.

Fast-forward seven years and Kassie’s now the proud mother of a charmingly neurotic little boy named Sebastian (Thomas Robinson). Do you remember that scene in Forrest Gump, where the junior and senior Gumps are watching television with their heads cocked to the side? Multiply that by an hour. Like Wally, Sebastian worries about everything (including global warming and animal rights), mistrusts everyone, is way too honest, and even unconsciously groans while he’s eating. He’s daddy’s gloomy little doppelganger.

The filmmakers behind The Switch seems to think that a little plot and some roughly sketched stock characters will suffice to make this movie both romantic and funny. But directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck present a romance that is a typical paint-by-numbers affair, complete with a nonstarter relationship between Kassie and golden boy Roland. Ultimately, Wally and Kassie fall in love because they have to in order for the film to have a happy ending and Sebastian to have a nice nuclear family. Gordon and Speck, who are competent enough, also serve up heaps of manipulative signifiers–like the kid’s obsession with the models in the photos sold with picture frames–and musical cues to tug at the heartstrings of anyone with daddy issues.

Meanwhile, Allan Loeb’s lazy scripting of a short story by Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides means that jokes are few and far between. What laughs there are along the way are earned by little Robinson and his enormous brown eyes acting like a fussy old man, cynical beyond his years. But this reviewer cannot live on precociousness alone, and time has proven that the “kids say the darndest things” approach to humor is best left to Bill Cosby.

The rest of the cast is left to do what they each do best. Aniston purses her lips like she’s tasted something that’s gone over in the fridge. Bateman is a likeable–but not loveable–version of Larry David. Juliette Lewis (as Kassie’s friend Debbie) shrieks, bounces, and is generally weird. And Jeff Goldblum (as Wally’s boss Leonard) stutters, pauses, and intonates like, well, Jeff Goldblum, actually making him the second best thing about this movie. Something tells me that no acting award nominations will be forthcoming for the cast of The Switch.