THE SWITCH 2/4 stars
Miramax Pictures, Rated PG-13
A romance where the exchange of love happens through bodily fluids, The Switch is an artificially inseminated tall tale in more ways than one. Focused on the idea that it takes two collaborators to direct a movie—as well as make babies—Josh Gordon and Will Speck flaunt pseudo-feminist attitudes in support of single moms while inserting controversy shunning conventional family values and mantras about just how damaged those sons without a dad can be.
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Jennifer Aniston does the pouting misguided woman-child thing as 40ish Kassie, a fabulously successful New York City television producer who yearns to also produce a child of her own and is financially comfortable enough to do so, but lacks a suitable male donor and has a biological clock winding down. Her best friend Wally (Jason Bateman), who has been secretly smitten with her for years but is too neurotic to say so, descends into a deep funk when Kassie appoints ready and able married dream guy Roland (Patrick Wilson) to provide his sperm sample instead.
Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman star in The Switch
So one night during what appears to be a female fertility gathering on Kassie’s behalf—as ridiculous as it sounds—Wally gets drunk and accidentally knocks over Roland’s specimen container into the sink. The inebriated prankster proceeds to replace it with his own sample, while getting in the mood to do so by admiring a perky photo of—I kid you not—Diane Sawyer on the cover of a magazine.
Now, if you’ve ever groaned about all those movies where a character wakes up the next morning and can’t remember having sex with the sweaty body next to them, laying an even bigger claim in the sexual amnesia department is Wally having not the least recollection of getting auto-erotic and fathering this subsequent child, Sebastian. It takes a stranger on a bus remarking how the terminally grouchy kid (a scene-stealing Thomas Robinson) Wally is babysitting six years later has got to be his son to jolt the dad into deep denial’s radically faulty memory.
Based loosely on the Jeffrey Eugenides story Baster, which was published in The New Yorker in 1996, The Switch is salvaged from leaving the impression of a totally preposterous scenario by intermittently smart dialogue and pleasingly nutty supporting performances, especially Robinson—dealing with insomnia, hypochondria and other precocious issues—and Bateman’s wacky male bonding buddy Jeff Goldblum.
In the end, it’s hard to believe a story positioning itself via voiceover narrator Bateman as a “miracle” that happens in the midst of that “randomness” called life isn’t pulling your leg, because a movie about donor accidents detouring into bait-and-switch fatherhood and traditional family imperatives isn’t any less contrived than narratives delivering basters along with those bundles of joy.
