Prime begins with counselor Lisa Metzger (Meryl Streep) telling her recently divorced client, 37-year-old Rafi Gardet (Uma Thurman), to embrace her new life and live it to the fullest. So when Rafi meets David (Bryan Greenberg), a hunky painter 14 years her junior, she does just that, deciding to have a little fun and enjoy the ride. When the two fall in love—this is a romantic comedy, after all—it’s only hampered by one thing: Rafi’s discovery that David is Lisa’s son.
Big shocker, right? And a funny one, right? Well, no—the whole plot development mostly just makes Prime uncomfortable and lame to watch. The most irritating thing is how patently unbelievable it all is—like once Lisa finds out that Rafi is dating her son, Lisa starts breaking all sorts of ethical codes and continues to counsel Rafi. C’mon—no counselor would ever be willing to get into that sort of deep shit! Even worse is how obviously writer/director Ben Younger (who also did 2000’s Boiler Room) tries to be hip—David comes across as an unbelievably awkward and clichéd twentysomething.
Complaints aside, the rest of the characters aren’t too bad (though this might be due to Thurman and Streep making the best out of what they’ve been given), and the tale even halfway redeems itself with a realistic ending and a surprisingly smart moral: Love isn’t always meant to last forever. But that moral’s not one necessarily worth making a whole film about—especially one as middling as Prime.