First off I'll admit that I'm reviewing this one off of the video, having missed it in theaters. It didn't get the most enthusiastic notices in the world plus it seemed to come and go in something of a hurry - pity. As far as traditional romantic comedies go (excluding 40 year old Virgin, as non-traditional) it was one of the very best of the year. Boasting a masterful comedic performance by Meryl Streep as a Jewish Psychiatrist whose patient's personal life takes a challenging U-turn, Prime is full of laughs and low on schmaltz and cliché. The only better performance in a movie of it's kind that I can withdraw from the old memory bank would have to be Joan Allen's tenacious tear through The Upside of Anger. Still it's a mystery why this film snuck through the year as unheralded as it did.

Written an directed by Ben Younger (an ironic name - as Uma Thurman's character would have been as happy as a clam had she only Been Younger) Prime relies on smart observations about sex, family, religion and of all thing chronological age, to weave a sexy and entertaining path through the timeless theme of love between a man and a woman. The film contains a few trite devices in order to makes it's observations - the inevitable breakups due to misunderstandings and conclusion jumping but the honest and bittersweet ending made up for any cliché's that trip it up along the way..

The film begins just as Uma Thurman's marriage of nine years has ended. She bemoans the feelings involved in signing those final papers to Streep who treats the distraught woman with so much affectionate understanding that you are fooled into thinking the two are mother and daughter. Their familiar manner belies any doctor patient relationship, as Streep offers the lovelorn woman sound advice as to the best way to go about putting a wreck of a relationship behind her and move ahead one day at a time. Soon Thurman meets a young man, (Bryan Greenberg) with aspirations of being an artist, but lives in the real world holding down a warehouse job and living with his maternal grandparents to save up. Greenberg is a perfect fit for the film, with such recognizable faces as Streep and Thurman it helps to give the film an iota of realism to have the male lead be an unfamiliar face.

Uma is a successful model ( such a stretch) and through a mutual friend they become acquainted at the cinema, fortuitously stealing a moment together to strike a little measure of mutual interest. Uma subtracts 4 years from her real age and Greenberg adds four and owing to such ersatz math their actual 15 year age difference is cut to a manageable sum. Greenberg paints a rather frightening picture of his mother - the prototypical overbearing Jewish mother, who disapproves of everything from his girlfriends to his dreams of being an artist. Over the phone she sounds like a perfect nightmare and when he goes to his parents for dinner who should emerge from the kitchen but Momma Meryl. A revelation we get the very day that Uma had gone into a blush of personal details about her new lover (his penis is so gorgeous she wants to knit it a little hat, etc.)

After putting a few two and two's together Meryl begins to pry a bit during one of her sessions with Thurman and becomes the first to discover the uncomfortable truth. Her timing, and comic smarts through this stretch are legitimately laugh out loud funny. Wrestling as she is to continue to be an effective therapist, but no longer so interested in every little detail about her fiery new romance. Though the premise sounds like a prototypical sit-com set-up Streep proves to be a mighty comic force with fantastic expressions and hilarious body language she spins it into pure gold. The rest plays out in a pretty conventional fashion aside from the refreshingly unsentimental ending. Prime refers to the fact that at the time of their meeting both Thurman and Greenberg are in their sexual prime, but more to the point it is better representative of Streep's stage of her career.