Carter is a happy well-adjusted young man. He owns a successful restaurant, has a nice apartment and a live-in girlfriend that he loves. Life seemingly couldn’t get better until one day his younger brother announces that he is going to marry the girl he has been dating for just four months, and that is the key for his life to very quickly start to fall apart.Carter’s parents divorced soon after his 9th birthday, and his main role since then has been to ensure that there are never ever in the same room together as they violently hate each. Troy not only wants them both invited to his impending nuptials, but he passes the almost impossible task of making that happen to his big brother. Their father is on his third marriage with Sondra who is not only much younger and independently wealthy but an extremely uptight and demanding woman. Carter refers to her as the ‘Cuntessa’. His highly strung manipulative mother has also remarried and this time she has chosen an easygoing guy with the sweetest of natures.
Carter is so terrified at the mere thought of trying to get these sworn enemies in one room for the wedding, he seeks out the Therapist who helped him when he was child. However it turns out that she is not a Shrink at all, but just a Researcher who was using her sessions with Carter and other kids from broken homes in order to write a best-selling book that shared all their traumas with the outside world.
Nevertheless despite this latest revelation Carter goes ahead with his plan to contrive a meeting that includes both his parents which ends up with a result that he didn’t expect and that could possible jeopardise not just his brother’s wedding, but his parents current marriages and his only relationship with his long-suffering girlfriend. His parents start having an affair.
This rather charming debut movie from writer/director Stu Zicherman is a very smart comedy that will be a major hit with all A.C.O.D’s i.e. Adult Children of Divorce, although they may not laugh quite so loud in the more painful parts of watching when roles are reversed with petulant parents. It astutely touches a nerve when Carter realises how much his parents marriage disasters have affected his own ambivalence to making and establishing his own committed relationship.
Mr Zicherman has a very strong cast of talented actors to tell his tale and make it the treat that it is. Carter is handsomely played by Adam Scott (TV’s Parks & Recreations) who makes for a very funny leading man, the hilarious Catherine O’Hara played ‘mother’, with gentle Richard Jenkins as the ‘angry’ dad. The very small part ‘Cuntessa’ was played by Amy Poehler, and Jane Lynch was wonderfully manic as the fake Therapist.
Highly recommended and should be compulsory viewing for all divorced parents. Especially the ones still at war with each other.
