This is hard: how to review Prime without giving away a central plot device? It’s the pivot on which the whole movie turns, so to give a comprehensive view of the movie, it has to be revealed. Yet, the moment at which the revelation takes place is so nicely done that it seems a pity to deprive the viewer of that pleasure.
Of course this is a hopeless task. It’s probable that most other reviewers will baldly state what I’m trying to conceal, and leave it at that. Word of mouth certainly won’t hold back. Moreover, the key moment takes place within the first half-hour of Prime, so perhaps revelation is permissible. At any rate, I’m going to try to keep it under wraps.
Prime is about a thirtysomething, just-divorced woman, the oddly named Rafi Gardet (Uma Thurman), who falls in love with a 23-year-old man; what you might call an August-April romance. Unfortunately for her, his Jewish mother is firmly opposed to his marrying a shiksa. He keeps trying, though, and Prime runs through a series of issues that come up in the course of this relationship. At times it feels like a bit of a primer on the subject: what to do when your younger boyfriend is unemployed; what to do when his family opposes your union, and so on.
It also feels like a child of Woody Allen, what with its New York setting and the use of Rafi’s sessions with her therapist (Meryl Streep) to push the narrative along and give us an insight into Rafi’s emotional goings-on (and those of her shrink). Allen himself, as you will recall, has played both patient and therapist — the latter, most hilariously, in Deconstructing Harry. Prime doesn’t take the idea that far, but it does strike some undermining blows in the direction of the therapist and therapy culture, and gives Streep an opportunity to display her ever-expanding comic talents. (One recalls, too, that she appeared in Allen’s Manhattan in 1979 — though I don’t remember her being especially amusing there.)
Prime isn’t as funny as a good Woody Allen movie, though it has some delightful humour embedded in it. Apart from Streep, its chief joy is seeing Thurman in a serious real-person role after the fripperies of Kill Bill and The Producers. On the other hand, the boyfriend, as played by Bryan Greenberg, is likeable but rather too callow. Whether that’s the actor skilfully impersonating a callow 23-year-old or not is impossible to tell but, as it stands, it’s rather difficult to see what Rafi sees in him beyond mild good looks and some boyish charm. (Greenberg is in fact 27 or 28, and those few years are crucial in the maturity stakes.)
Still, overall, Prime is watchable and entertaining. It can’t decide how to end (happy? sad? somewhere in between?) and keeps trying alternatives, but that is perhaps a realistic depiction of relationships and their denouements. So, if you want some amusingly messy real life from a movie, Prime will do.