Salon.com recently introduced Film Salon, “a new collaborative forum that aims to bring together movie lovers of all kinds — bloggers, critics and academics; directors, screenwriters, producers and other professionals — to debate the most exciting topics in the film universe.” The project’s first venture is Films of the Decade, blog posts in which contributors share a few thoughts about “their favorite film of the 2000s, aka the Decade That Ended Without a Satisfactory Name.” To date, several writers, critics, directors, etc. have explained why Gladiator, Pixar’s oeuvre, Elf, and Idiocracy are the films that they find most satisfying. On that note, here’s mine…

Although Salon‘s Charles Taylor would almost surely disagree, there are several reasons that Nancy Meyers’s Something’s Gotta Give (2003), a comedy about two middle-aged people who find love (and lots of sex) in the autumn of their lives, should make Film Salon‘s “decade list.” Here are three:

Something’s Gotta Give is one of only a handful of films to target and successfully reach two audiences that Hollywood frequently ignores: women and moviegoers over the age of 50.

It is a well-documented fact that although women represent 51% of box office sales, Hollywood rarely creates movies for them, opting instead for a slew of what Nancy Meyers recently dubbed “man movies” (e.g., Ironman, Superman, A Serious Man, A Solitary Man, A Single Man). And when the industry does dole out a film aimed at women, it is unfortunately something like “Mamma Mia,” which succeeds financially, some argue, ONLY because “women are starved for representations of themselves.” Likewise, I can think of just six other films from the Aughts that feature lead characters over the age of 50, another underrepresented demographic in Hollywood: Space Cowboys (2000), About Schmidt (2002), Calendar Girls (2003), The Queen (2006), The Bucket List (2007), and Up (2009). The majority of these films are thoughtful, multifaceted, even Oscar-worthy. Yet, like Something’s Gotta Give, they surface so infrequently.

Something’s Gotta Give is screwball comedy at its finest.

Meyers’s film almost perfectly imitates the central conventions, characterization, and narrative structure of classical screwball comedies like His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, and My Man Godfrey. Resembling its classic predecessors (rather than most simplistic contemporary romantic comedies), Something’s Gotta Give presents a comparatively complex view of love and romance, which is represented by slapstick humor, verbal sparring/foreplay, and a female character (Diane Keaton) who functions actively (rather than passively) throughout (e.g., ultimately it’s Keaton’s character who pursues Jack Nicholson’s). I have to admit that it was refreshing to think of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn when I screened this movie. (I’ve written more about this aspect of the film in the spring 2009 issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television.)

Something’s Gotta Give amusingly employs intertextuality.

In this film Nicholson’s character (Harry Sanborn) grins devilishly, dons Ray Bans, smokes cigars, and dates only younger women — a characterization that is clearly a send-up to the actor’s own star persona. Similarly, Keaton’s character (Erica Barry) is somewhat ditzy, gesticulates excessively, speaks with frequent pauses and repetition, and dresses in white or black buttoned-up clothes and hats — an onscreen characterization that also closely resembles Keaton’s star image. Such a noticeable yet not overly distracting parody constructs for the viewer a unique, playful, and pleasurable merger between fiction and “reality.”