Meryl Streep, uncomplicated

Some of the best, and dirtiest, lines in It's Complicated can't be printed in a family newspaper. Heck, some of the best lines aren't even lines.

Instead, they're looks, landed with the skill of a Chesley Sullenberger by two masters of comic acting in this very grown-up, and very funny, love story. The romantic comedy about a divorced couple having an affair manages to be both light on its feet and heavy enough to deliver something of a message. But more on that later.

The masters in question, of course, are Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin. As Jane and Jake Adler, 10 years divorced and with three grown children, yet suddenly drawn back into each other's lives (and beds) after a drunken fling over the weekend of their son's (Hunter Parrish) college graduation, the stars pick up the movie and run away with it.

The writing and direction, by rom-com veteran Nancy Meyers, are deft enough. But it's Streep and Baldwin's gamely ribald performances, and their seemingly effortless, effervescent chemistry, that put the pep in this movie's highly choreographed, yet richly entertaining step.

Extraordinary

While writing the script, Meyers kept Streep in mind for the role of the 50-something Jane. Meyers says: "She was the first person I went to, and I was thrilled beyond words that she wanted to do it. She's extraordinary; she's the most prepared actor I've ever worked with. Meryl doesn't just know her lines, she sees the movie as a whole — as a filmmaker would."

When she read the script, Streep was moved by the fact that Meyers had "tapped into something deep about families who've encountered divorce... or anybody who has been abandoned by someone they love".

Streep understood Jane as a woman who "had reached a point where, after the disruptions of a life, is having a good time".

She elaborates: "Her business is finally launched and successful, and she's reconciled herself to the divorce that ended her marriage 10 years before. Jane's embarking upon this big building project and interested in the architect of it. Things are looking great... until Jake re-enters her life."

The actress believes that the comedy's setup was sensitive to, as she puts it, "forgotten women: women who don't see their lives played out the way they do in this film. There are no movies in which a woman, 10 years happily divorced, reignites a relationship with her ex. This is not a common occurrence in movies... or in life."

True to the film's title, Jane and Jake's affair is a little tricky, made so both by the fact that Jake is remarried, to a hot but hard-looking harpy played by Lake Bell, and by the growing flirtation between Jane and Adam (Steve Martin), the gentlemanly architect who's redoing her house.

Women of a certain age are going to love that. They won't know which is sexier: that Jane is lusted over by two handsome suitors or that she's finally getting her dream kitchen.

In other words, there's two kinds of cheesecake being served here. The half-sexy, half-comic kind exemplified by an all-but-naked Baldwin attempting to hide his considerable girth behind the flimsy screen of a laptop computer — in one hilarious seduction scene that involves Martin's character watching in horror at the other end of a video-chat screen — and cheesecake of a more literal sort.

Jane, you see, is a talented chef and owner of a bustling bakery-cum-coffeehouse, and Meyers sets as many scenes as possible within its homey confines. There, or in Jane's casually elegant home kitchen, around whose farm-style table she's often shown preparing food for her adorable brood, which includes daughters played by Zoe Kazan and Caitlin Fitzgerald, and a future son-in-law (John Krasinski, never better).

Now, about that message.

Ten years after her marriage failed, food has become, for Jane, almost a surrogate for love. She uses it to bind her kids to her. She uses it to seduce Adam, in a late-night bout of the munchies brought on by a pot-fuelled party, after which they passionately bake chocolate croissants together. And it's one of the things that Jake misses most about his ex-wife (and that just might explain that considerable girth). "I love it when you smell like butter," he tells her, in Baldwin's trademark, big-cat purr.

In the end, though, we don't ever get to see the finished new kitchen. We don't have to. When Jane finally does find love, and I'm not going to say with whom, it's not because of what's in her hearth, but in her heart.