It's hard to make a good by-the-numbers film, but Courteney Cox rose to the challenge. I'm not being sarcastic. If anyone claims it's possible to make a BETTER film out this stuff, don't believe them. It's as perfect as it could hope to get.
This movie was probably inspired by the Robert DeNiro flick titled "Everybody's Fine" (2009), in which an old father decides to visit all his four children - whose lives are all mildly messed-up. DeNiro learns that his son #1 is not the big-league musician he pretended to be, and the other son is a drug addict; that his daughter #1, who is sort of a high-powered business-lady, has been dumped by her husband, and the other daughter is a lesbian.
As you can see, it's pretty much the same material, same territory. The key difference is that "Everybody's Fine" is soporific, while this new movie is mostly brisk and fun to watch.
As for originality, well, there's no hope for originality in a movie that tries its best to stay within the confines of realism. There just isn't. Blue-skinned aliens? A pointy-eared cape-wearer? A magic princess singing and creating a huge castle out of thin air in 12 seconds? Oh man, looks like none of these brilliant, Oscar-proved things will fit into out little suburban melodrama.
Here are some minor nitpicks I have for the movie:
1) Is Elisha Cuthbert the only girlfriend that our hero has has since moving out of his home town? How so? He's a handsome guy with a nice voice and even nicer personality. The moment he arrived "home", at least three chicks wanted to jump his bones right away. But not back in LA?
2) At his Dad's funeral (opening scenes), his mother is played by an actress in her early thirties. The boys are like 10 or 12. Which means that the mother is older than the kids by roughly 20 years - precisely the age difference one would expect, I guess.
Yet when Ted returns home 30 years later, his mother is played by Connie Stevens, who is 76 years old. Sean William the actor is 38. Which means that now Ted's mother is roughly 40 years older than him. You could say that maybe they tried to pass Connie for a 60-year-old, but no - Connie's lesbian girlfriend is played by Diane Ladd - who is EIGHTY. So why is the mom so old? Did she bear her boys at age 40, or something?
I suspect that the only reason why the mother aged so mysteriously was because Courtney Cox just really wanted to put the old girls (Stevens and Ladd) into her picture - to make the movie more chic and maybe to give the ladies a bit of work.
But for me, this considerably undermined the realism of the film. The mother is supposed to be the pivotal character in stories like this - in this movie, however, the character got all sorts of shortchanged. Maybe if Ms. Cox the director played the boys' mother herself (in the childhood scenes), then it would at least have been consistent. (Cox is 50 and gave birth to her daughter at 40. Would have fit the movie sweetly, age-wise.)
Overall, I enjoyed the film. I wish more screen time had been spent on the cruel math teacher (not enough of her cruelty is shown), and on Ted's high-school days in general - the bullies, the sweet blonde girl, his brother, their mother. Also the movie would probably have benefited from not having the gay-boy storyline at all - it's not bad per se, but makes the whole movie feel kind of trite and tired - "same old, same old."
