THE SWITCH

Shitty Sunday, day-for-night skies and crashing rain, thunder like a slammed door.

A simple principle of the rom-com: through the essential nature of the supporting cast we shall discern the impediment to love. Juliette Lewis and Jeff Goldblum—so we’re too happy being odd. Over the seven-year course of the film (2003-2010) New York doesn’t change, Aniston and Jason Bateman don’t so much as cut their hair. Its potential for fizzy stasis is the profoundest hope and fear for this place, as the hypochondriac seeks by incessant naming to ward off forever the event.

Kiss the writer who made broker Bateman’s rival, Patrick Wilson (the sperm donor to braless biological-clock watcher Aniston), an “Assistant Professor of Feminist Literary Tradition at Columbia.” It’s true, they’re so full of shit—not feminists, obviously, but people at Columbia. When drunken, besotted Bateman swaps out his own sample for Wilson’s, it’s not an act of bio-possessiveness but a rescue—the insemination of her shampoo-fresh normalcy by straight-up neurosis rather than a gender critique that would threaten her very life. Though what is a child but a critique that cuts both ways?

The kid is so sweet. Gesture persists, it sutures performance to the spirit. Prickly, bullied, afraid for animals—I can’t imagine anyone who would identify with that. The third act reveals the lie; before one may love, always, one’s fraudulence must be violently stripped away, and forgiven. Loneliness montage (treadmill, park, computer screen-lit face in darkened office). His declaration interrupts her rival’s proposal—can you imagine speaking up like that? The switch. Some days you want to just reach right out and flip it.