PRIME

"I've got t-shirts that are older than you"

Rafi

After signing her divorce papers Rafi Gardet (Thurman) ask her therapist Lisa Metzger (Streep) for advice on what she do next when is comes to relationships. When she tells her enjoy herself a little, she takes a chance on a date with David (Greenberg). As the relationship develops however an issue becomes more and more apparent, she is thirty-seven and he is twenty-three.

The romantic comedy has changed over the years with most of them based around a high concept but 'Prime' sees a return reality to bring us a story of ordinary people.

Writer/director Ben Younger takes us back to a time when the romantic comedy didn't need an outrageous hook to draw and audience in. Instead of date doctors, wedding crashers and forty year-old virgins we have a story about an issue that is a lot more realistic that most of the rom-coms Hollywood has been producing of late. That issue is something that is not extreme or improbable, an older woman having a relationship with a younger man.

With a fourteen-year difference between Rafi and David, this creates real problems and situations that are very easy to relate to. The film also includes some comedy around the very contempory. This mainly comes from an actress you'd normally associate with drama, Meryl Streep. As well as the real issues that come with the relationship the two principles, you also have the dynamic between therapist and patient and mother and son. The connection is that Meryl plays both mother and therapist.

The Oscar winning actress excels as the woman who is divided between her duty to her patient and her feeling as a mother. Once she realises that Rafi is dating her son David, she really comes into her own proving what a great actress she is, whatever the genre. Most, if not all, of the comedy comes from her as her neurotic character becomes more and more traumatised by Rafi revelations about her relationship with her son David.

With such a heady co-star, it was always going to be hard for both Uma Thurman and Bryan Greenberg to compete with her screen presence but they do manage to hold their own. As Rafi and David, the pair has real chemistry making it easy for you to understand how the age gap might not be such a hindrance. It is when the relationship grows and progresses when the cracks start to appear, when the pair really come into their own. This is more drama than comedy, as they face real age-gap issues and the differences between become more and more apparent. These are roles are extremely well played by the pair and one that should get Bryan Greenberg noticed.

'Prime' is a different kind of romantic comedy. Dealing with a realistic issue makes the film easy to relate to but there is not really much comedy here meaning that the film plays more to a female audience than a male. Whether this is intentional, we will never know but the lack of laughs might not help this appeal to anyone other than its target audience. You have to applaud the approach however, as this treats the audience with a lot more intelligence than the current crop of rom-coms.