Rafi Gardet (Uma Thurman) is a thirty-seven-year-old well-to-do career woman who has just come out of a bitter divorce at the end of a nine-year marriage. Two weeks or so into her divorce, she meets Dave (Bryan Greenberg) and they seem to have the perfect relationship; each gives the other what they need in a person. Unfortunately Dave is a whopping fourteen years younger than Rafi, at age twenty-three. This troubles Rafi and she tells her therapist (Meryl Streep) this. Unfortunately, Dave happens to be the son of Lisa, Rafi's therapist, and Lisa is torn between the decision to stay loyal to her patient, or betray her motherly instincts.
Review
Prime, as I expected after having seen the trailer, was a very typical chick flick. Unfortunately for the couple who sat behind me, it had apparently seemed different to some other people because they thought that it was going to be something else, and were very disappointed with the chick flick-ish nature of things. Just to be warned, if you don't like chick flicks, you will not like Prime.
Secondly, the title of the film didn't really seem to tie in with the plot at all. In the very early parts of Rafi and Dave's relationship, (before Lisa realizes that Dave is her son), Lisa mentions that they are both at their sexual peak, but she is also under the impression that Dave is 27 and not 23. This is the only thing even remotely close to relating to the title of the film that occurred during the two hours I sat there.
An interesting aspect of this film was the way the scenes were put together. The way this film is shot really had a noticeable effect on the way it was viewed. The scenes were very choppy, and they didn't flow together well. It seemed as if most of the scenes were originally extended and had to be cut down for time. There were times when the scene would change almost mid-sentence, and there were parts of the film which were filmed in a different way, and that was also unsettling.
Another interesting (though vastly unbelievable) event that took place was the relationship between Dave and his friend Morris. Though Morris was very chauvinistic and smashed pies in the faces of girls who wouldn't go on a second date with him, his attitude towards Dave was different. The conversations portrayed between Dave and Morris were those of a very close relationship, but they didn't seem like a close friendship between two men, they seemed like a close friendship between two women.
All in all, the biggest flaw in this film was its incredibly flimsy plot. After Lisa found out that her son was the one she was hearing about from her patient, the film just seemed to dwindle away for two hours. Nothing really happened for a while, and then suddenly things changed drastically. The whole therapist thing itself was not enough to build an entire film off of, and that's exactly what the writers tried to do. This film could have been much better than it was if it had just had some more depth to it. The entire thing was about the relationships between Dave and Rafi and Lisa, and it just chased itself around in circles for what seemed like forever.
Conclusion
More than anything else, this film succeeded in boring me. I was sitting there in the theatre actually thinking "I'm bored" and waiting impatiently for the credits to start rolling. The vast majority of this film was just dead time. So much nothingness took place in the two hours that I sat there. At the end of the film, the characters are in almost the same place they were in the beginning of the film. It's as if it might as well have not happened. One point five stars for Prime, because it bored me and nothing happened.
