Based on the promotional material for The Rebound, you might think you know what you’re getting into. Here in the Czech Republic, the film is titled Sexy 40. In the trailer, the eccentric best friend loudly exclaims to Catharine Zeta-Jones: “you’re screwing the nanny!?” Yeah, traditional romantic comedy territory.
Well, forget all that. The Rebound is a romantic comedy, yes. There’s some misplaced gross out comedy (mostly in the form of NYC vagrants and eccentrics) and irrepressible kids who say the darndest things (and dissect rats found in their apartment).
But otherwise this is – surprise – an entirely effective and affectionate movie, and one of the best romantic comedies in recent memory, limited only by its genre trappings.
Zeta-Jones plays a 40ish suburban housewife and mother of two Sandy, who gets a rude surprise when reviewing her kid’s birthday video footage: her husband (Sam Robards) with another woman. So she flees to the Big Apple with her children, finds an apartment above a coffee shop and a job with a sports network, and releases her rage on a man in a sumo suit during a self-defense course.
Inside that sumo suit is Aram Finkelstein (Justin Bartha), a recent college graduate who happens to work at the coffee shop underneath Sandy’s apartment. He’s lost in life and in love; his young French wife recently left him after obtaining her green card, but he can’t quite bring himself to divorce her, because he doesn’t want to get her kicked out of the country.
Aram begins to babysit for Sandy while she goes out to be fondled by disgusting men, and with her full-time job, he soon takes on a more permanent role in the family’s life. And yes, soon enough Sandy is screwing the nanny. And building a deeper, meaningful relationship with him.
Aram is wonderful with the kids – they feature in some of the film’s best scenes – and with Sandy, too. Here are two characters we really like and want to see together – how great is that, and how sorry is the current state of this genre that this is one of the very few films I can say that about.
Only society, and, perhaps, logic, is working against the couple – she’s nearly twice his age (of course, in reality, the age gap between Bartha and Zeta-Jones is only 9 years.)
The Rebound, refreshingly, does not follow the traditional rom-com plot, and deserves all the praise I can muster just for that. Director Bart Freundlich takes a surprisingly level-headed examination of the situation his characters are placed in.
It’s not a perfect movie by any means – and it almost loses itself during a protracted finale – but it’s just about the best this genre can offer. An enthusiastic recommendation.
