BFFs?: Friends with Kids

My past few posts have noted movies that I went into with pretty high expectations and that disappointed - movies that for the most part took on big themes and fell apart under the weight of their own pretensions (and audience expectations), but last night saw a movie that kind of slipped in beneath the radar and in fact was far better than I'd expected - a light-hearted genre romantic comedy that turned out to be both genuinely funny and in my view true to life, with ample plot twists and unexpected developments that showed the growth and evolution of the character, perhaps of all of the (6) main characters without feeling scripted or arbirtrary: Jennifer Westfeldt's Friends with Kids - which starts out with 6 Manhattan yuppie types meeting for dinner and drinks in a rather sleep restaurant and from the start you don't particularly like them, they seem spoiled and wealthy and narcisstic, seemingly a bad start, but we watch them grow out of this - into the next phase, when 2 of the couples have kids and the third "couple" the main characters, played by Westfeldt (who also wrote and directed!) and Adam Scott are just old friend, not even attracted to each other - observing the stresses that kids put on a once-successful marriage, they decide they want to have a baby but not be married not even a couple - seems quite unlikely but Westfeldt brings it off and the various complications ensue - the jealousies, arguments about responsibility, shifting affections, etc. - this is another in the long history of movies of girl-boy best friends who do/do not become a couple: think of Annie Hall, Jules & Jim, When Harry, and the very recent and very weak Celeste and Jesse Forever - this one stands with the best, some absolutely terrific scenes (the ski weekend, the first visit to the home of the couple in Brooklyn since parenthood, the parents' visits to see the newborn, and many others) - Westfeldt has affection for her characters with all their faults and mistakes, never takes a superior attitude, lets their lives unfold in a variety of ways, some good some not so good. Not a deep or profound movie, nor does it mean to be, but a solid comedy that feels accurate and real.