Prime

A career driven professional from the Upper East Side (Uma Thurman) who is wooed by a young painter from Brooklyn, who also happens to be the son of her psychoanalyst (Meryl Streep).

Two women get a new and unusual perspective on the doctor/patient relationship in this romantic comedy. Rafi Gardet (Uma Thurman) is a woman in her mid-thirties who has recently gone through a messy divorce. Rafi has been seeing an analyst, Lisa Metzger (Meryl Streep), as she struggles to get back on her feet emotionally and look for new love. Rafi meets a man named David Bloomberg (Bryan Greenberg), and the two quickly hit it off, but Rafi isn't sure if she should pursue the relationship, since David is only 23 years old. After discussing the burgeoning romance during one of their weekly sessions, Lisa urges Rafi to take a plunge with David, and not be afraid to seek out the companionship she needs. However, there's something about David that Lisa doesn't know — he's her son. Rafi doesn't know that Lisa is David's mother, either, and both psychiatrist and patient are thrown for a loop when they learn the truth. Prime was originally intended to star Sandra Bullock as Rafi, but she dropped out of the project shortly before filming began, reportedly due to disagreements with the director over the script, with Thurman taking her place. — Mark Deming

AMG Review Ben Younger's Prime fails as a credible romance, but has a pair of performances that make it somewhat worthwhile. Uma Thurman is an actress whose beauty consistently makes people underestimate her talent. She has made her thirtysomething divorcée thrillingly alive with the promise of a new love. During the therapy scenes where she discusses the joy and pleasure she gets from this new relationship, she quivers with such happiness that the audience will be swept along by her feelings. Thurman gets pitch-perfect support from Meryl Streep, who allows her therapist character to take a motherly pride on behalf of her patient, a maternal instinct that warps entertainingly when she learns the identity of her patient's boyfriend. Prime fails because the character of the young twentysomething lover is always either a perfect young man or a callous immature jerk. There is never a scene in which the actor (Bryan Greenberg) is forced to play these two poles of his character at the same time. He is always 100-percent selfish or 100-percent selfless, making it harder and harder to accept that Thurman would hang onto him for as long as she does seeing as her divorce has taught her when a relationship is dead. Prime is a well-acted film that fails to make losing love as interesting as discovering it. — Perry Seibert