`Friends with Kids': Raunchy fun with a few emotional benefits

Julie and Jason are just the opposite of "friends with benefits" -- best buds of many years, who live in the same building, hang out together and call each other constantly at all hours to confide their deepest secrets. But it's strictly platonic. They're not attracted to each other "that way."

Both of these successful happy New Yorkers really want a child, just not with each other -- or any formal "spouse." They want to stay attractive and available. Don't we all? What they never want is to subject their hypothetical kids to the inevitably "tragic marriage."

Such is the premise of director-writer-producer-star Jennifer Westfeldt. The only thing she didn't do for "Friends With Kids," evidently, was the catering and grip work. Her Julie and Adam Scott's Jason have two sets of couple-friends: bickersome Leslie (Maya Rudolph) and Alex (Chris O'Dowd), and oversexed Ben (Jon Hamm) and Missy (Kristen Wiig). All six of them have (vaguely unidentified) affluent white-collar jobs and lifestyles. But Julie and Jason are more cynical and selfish than the others, convinced that having children means sacrificing your own happiness in marriage. No more partying once the kids arrive: You can't get a decent night's sleep or your sex life back on track.

But what if you could bypass marriage, with all of the anger, exhaustion, infidelity and probable divorce? J & J hit on a better way: Have a kid together but (after the obligatory One Time coupling) keep things platonic, live apart as singles with joint custody, stay friends and avoid all the marital hassles, while sleeping in -- and around -- to their hearts' content.

So they do the deed and lo, it comes to pass, nine months later, that baby Joe is born in a hospital delivery room, where their friends and parents all show up. It's an over-the-top but funny scene. "How are your children?" Jason's mother asks the other couples, "---the ones born IN wedlock?"

Undaunted, J & J get into parenthood and, instead of being miserable, are happily functional---to the disappointment of their married friends. Jason encourages Julie to go on dates while he baby-sits (“Tell mommy you hope she gets laid!” he coos to the infant). He, for his part, takes up with sexy dancer M.J. (Megan Fox). Julie meets the wonderfully attractive and attentive Kurt (Ed Burns), who is sooo marvelous with baby Joe.

Can J & J's mutual jealousy and neediness be far behind?

No. And neither can Ms. Westfeldt's need to contrive enough conflict to delay the Hollywood ending. She does so by means of much clever (sometimes annoying) overlap-crosstalk dialogue, a la Seinfeld, and by borrowing devices such as the opening split-screen phone conversation in the sack, a la "Pillow Talk."

Most interesting is a dinner-party scene later in the film, when drunk wife Wiig spars with bitter husband Hamm. They've come a long way from wild airplane-lavatory sex at the outset to "Now look at us ...." All of a sudden the badinage -- or is it persiflage? I never quite know -- gets serious, and the movie turns briefly into "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

To the extent that the resultant soap opera is realistic, its ultimate trouble sign is that Jason makes a book for Julie that she --in her fickle, compulsive search for something new and better -- can't stand even to look at. He was a fool to make it.

The cast is uniformly fine. No fewer than four of them are from "Bridesmaids" (Ms. Rudolph, Mr. O'Dowd, Ms. Wiig and Mr. Hamm). Mr. Scott's performance turns out to be deeper than you'd expect, and Ms. Westfeldt's Julie is -- if not deep -- an effectively nervous, funny, Streisand-esque talkaholic. Best of the rest: Ms. Rudolph and Mr. O'Dowd as the snarkier but more loving couple, equally catty and sensitive.

Even Ms. Fox ("the new worldwide face of Giorgio Armani" ad campaigns for perfume, makeup and underwear!) is good. Her role is perfectly matched to her...uh, specialized skill set---except that we can’t smell her. (For the full Fox experience, buy a little bottle of Armani's eau de toilette beforehand and sniff it whenever she appears on screen.)

"Friends With Kids" has nothing remotely to do with kids -- all of whom are caricatured as either adorable or hideous, depending on what the scenes call for. But the fact that its adult characters develop more or less empathetically is a credit to Ms. Westfeldt's script. It contains no nudity or sex but a great deal of raunchy dialogue, including a final line so crass that even I -- for the first time since sticking my finger into a light socket as a child -- was shocked.

The comedy is just funny enough and the contrived drama almost real enough to work as a heavier-than-usual chick flick -- an odd combination of sitcom and romcom (a "romcomdram"?) that ends up as a kind of backhanded endorsement of the Marriage Amendment: Lovelorn and kid-lorn people may toy with various hip options, but they tend to return, like non-reprogrammable homing pigeons, to the same safe old hole.