There’s a switch in The Switch, but it’s not the one you think. There’s a switch in the plot, of course – a jar of donated semen that gets spilled, then replaced – but the real switch is conceptual: this is a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston, only the Jennifer Aniston role isn’t played by Jennifer Aniston. She, for a change, is positive and “fearless”. Instead, the neurotic kook who can’t find a partner – Jenny’s patented rom-com role in the past few years – is played by Jason Bateman, as the guy who switches the aforementioned sperm with his own.
In fact, the film this resembles most starkly isn’t a Jennifer Aniston rom-com but Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, the kids’ film from a couple of years ago – not because of any magic toys, but because that also featured Bateman bonding with a timid, precocious, rather gloomy little boy. In that one, his nickname was ‘Mutant’; in this one, he’s referred to as “undateable” – not because he’s unattractive but because a combination of blunt honesty and unhealthy pessimism makes him a “buzz-kill”, a fount of negativity. He’s best friends with Jenny, but platonically so. A typical meeting has him showing her a photo of his scrotum – he thinks he has a “growth”, being a hypochondriac on top of everything else – then waxing dubious about her decision to have a child by artificial insemination.
Despite his doubts, Jen goes ahead – and, unlike Jennifer Lopez in The Back-Up Plan, treats the project seriously, shopping around for a donor and even throwing a party to celebrate the deed (sperm donors also turned up in The Kids Are All Right last year, so it’s clearly a happening subject for chick-skewing comedy). Jen admits the party is “really depressing”, but the donor – a sensitive-Viking type named Roland (Patrick Wilson) who’s married to his “soulmate” and teaches a course in Feminist Literary Tradition – does his duty, and the magic jar is placed in the bathroom where a drunken Bateman performs the switch then forgets all about it, waking up next morning with a terrible headache and no memory of the night before.
The bathroom switcheroo is perhaps the worst scene in the movie, played determinedly lowbrow – yet even here I chuckled once, when Jason looks around for literature to inspire him in replenishing the jar but can only find an IKEA catalogue (in the end, he makes do with a magazine cover of talk-show host Diane Sawyer). Everything else is better than expected, maybe because directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck previously made the zany Will Ferrell comedy Blades of Glory and come to the debased rom-com genre with a fresh eye. Their happiest inspiration may be giving the role of Hero’s Best Friend – usually played loud, callow and testosterone-laden – to middle-aged, wildly eccentric Jeff Goldblum, who cheerfully sabotages his stock rom-com dialogue with a wry expression and secretly delighted, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. After a while, everything he says becomes funny, whether it’s a reference to “dogs in the cellar” (what?) or a tortured, long-drawn-out reading of “Thaaaat’s … ill-advised.”
The Switch is a film I was dreading (the premise sounded cheap, and Aniston comes with a health warning after Love Happens and The Bounty Hunter), yet it turned out to be quite enjoyable. I shouldn’t oversell it; it’s no more than enjoyable – but the stuff on the fringes is often hilarious, even when the main plot falters. Jen, looking for donors, meets a hunky actor who earnestly informs her that “They still haven’t made an honest kickboxing movie” (this same actor later takes the lead in an all-nude Macbeth). Later, when the kid arrives – Bateman’s offspring, though everyone assumes it’s the sensitive Viking’s – he turns out to be a sad-eyed 6-year-old with the weight of the world on his shoulders: “Nature’s in crisis,” he tells the assembled adults, “and there’s only one mammal to blame”. Lighten up, kid.
What happens next is predictable. Bateman – who of course has been in love with Jenny all along, and she with him – dithers and dithers about telling the truth, and must finally reveal all in the most public, most embarrassing setting possible. Even that scene, however, didn’t make me cringe; Bateman isn’t too humiliated, nor is the Viking too disheartened (Gordon and Speck are kind to their characters). Bottom line? The Switch may turn out to be the film that makes Jennifer Aniston cool again. She should refrain from playing Jennifer Aniston more often.
