Jennifer Lopez

Here’s the thing: Simply by trying to break free of the hoariest situations and archetypes, and to create characters who talk and behave somewhat like actual young (or at least youngish) middle-class Americans, director Nanette Burstein and her cast have made the year’s best mainstream rom-com. But seriously, consider the competition: Two “comeback vehicles” for fading stars named Jennifer, both of them self-fulfilling prophecies about the difficulties faced by American actresses over 40, both of them encouraging the media to be both observers and enablers of Hollywood sexism. (Yeah, mea culpa on that one.) “Sex and the City 2,” a genuinely idiotic film that got beaten up out of all proportion. “Eat, Pray, Love,” which of course doesn’t really qualify as a rom-com, but would have been a lot better if it did. And I can’t go back to February and revisit the fact that I actually spent a little bit of my life watching “Valentine’s Day.” I just can’t.

So awarding a prize to “Going the Distance” in this context is a little like giving an A for effort to the only student in your class who isn’t dropping out to take a job at Chick-Fil-A. It’s the only romantic comedy to emerge from Hollywood this year that doesn’t feel completely defensive and cynical. It doesn’t condescend to its audience or shamelessly yank the emotional chains of middle-aged female viewers. It isn’t set in Romcom USA, that mysterious alternate universe where the clothes and cars look convincing but everyone’s apartment is three times too large and the conversations and situations all seemingly belong to the Mary Tyler Moore era.

Most impressively, Burstein and screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe do not seem to share the widespread assumption that romantic comedy is a contemptible if economically necessary phenomenon, based entirely on feeding over-35 women a steady drip of the dumbest possible clichés about guys and gals and that joyous-yet-painful thing that happens between them. (Besides home mortgages, I mean. And pubic lice.) “Going the Distance” doesn’t always click but has a distinctive, sardonic voice and vision. It at least tries to capture the social world of Erin (Barrymore) and Garrett (Long), a couple of smart but underemployed post-collegiate types who meet over the Centipede machine in a New York bar, smack dab in the middle of a shrinking economy.

Now, am I claiming that “Going the Distance” is a Zeitgeist-capturing yarn of love in our hookup culture, one that may capture the mood of an entire generation? I am not. It has a little of that ambition, which is admirable and all. In bringing together a documentary filmmaker (Burstein made the docs “American Teen” and “The Kid Stays in the Picture”) with an unknown screenwriter, this film’s producers seem to be splitting the difference between conventional rom-com and more “alt” fare, like the films of indie auteurs Joe Swanberg or Andrew Bujalski. But I strongly suspect the skeptics are right. Of course romantic comedy could come back, and it undoubtedly will. But at the moment it’s a moribund genre, with little appeal to the “Twilight” generation of girls and young women. All a pleasant, offbeat movie like “Going the Distance” can hope to do is swim halfheartedly against the ebbing tide.

I spent a little while after watching “Going the Distance” trying to puzzle out its flaws and limitations — the directing is better than the writing, the actors rise above a pedestrian plot, etc. — before arriving at the perfect summary: It’s kind of good, but not all that great! (Hear that sound? That’s the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, whooshin’ toward me.) Thing is, Barrymore is so terrific as Erin, a ballsy, physical, foulmouthed guys’ gal who’s universes away from your average neurotic rom-com heroine, that you keep thinking a movie built around her ought to be awesome. So the fact that is isn’t is continually surprising.

When Erin and Garrett go home together after their little contretemps at the Centipede machine — she was about to hit a high score before he screwed it up — neither one of them is exactly thinking about a great romance. He broke up with somebody else quite recently (OK, minutes earlier). They do bong hits and make out. She pretends to be outraged that Garrett’s hopeless roommate Dan (comedian Charlie Day) is “DJ’ing the hookup,” i.e., playing the “Top Gun” score through the flimsy apartment walls while they get it on. They actually have breakfast together the next morning, complete with sincere conversation — but when Garrett calls Erin later, she still doesn’t know his name.

This whole sequence of scenes around the couple’s first meeting is so charged with tenderness, toughness and combative, outrageous humor — and that brash, braying Barrymore laugh — that one can only wish the rest of “Going the Distance” lived up to it even halfway. But as Garrett and Erin fall in love, Burstein almost immediately resorts to a montage of, God help me, the couple frolicking on the beach or strolling Manhattan’s streets hand in hand. See, their idyll is to be short-lived: Erin’s a summer intern at a New York newspaper who’s heading back to grad school in California, while Garrett works at a record label that used to be hip and is now hoping to survive by finding the next Jonas Brothers.

Yes, the fact that they both work in crippled or dying industries is meant to be significant, but like a lot of other things in LaTulippe’s script it comes off as intriguing but a little half-baked. Why is Garrett and Dan’s other buddy, Box (Jason Sudeikis), so interested in finding a girlfriend over 45 who will, in some epistemological sense, not be a cougar? Why must we learn strange but irrelevant details about the sex life of Erin’s unhinged married sister (played by Christina Applegate, who is very funny)? I think the only reason is that screenplays in the post-Tarantino, late-Apatow era must garnish their supporting characters with all kinds of potentially symbolic eccentricities.

Inescapably, “Going the Distance” gets more flaccid and ordinary as it manages the highly predictable yuks emerging from Garrett and Erin’s efforts to keep their relationship going across 3,000 miles of low-budget separation. I never lost interest in this couple, who have a relaxed and natural chemistry together (as I guess they should). If Long’s no match for Barrymore, he’s still a genial comic performer, and even the most ordinary parts of the film deliver plenty of laughs. You never have the feeling that “Going the Distance” got made because of econometric projections; the people involved actually like it, and that counts for a lot. Can it save the rom-com? Definitely not, but I’m not sure anything can.

Still, “Gigli” signaled that the curtain was beginning to fall on Lopez’s first act, if you will. After that came “Shall We Dance” with Richard Gere, God help us, and then the alarming, inept “Monster-in-Law” with its muggy, mincing supporting performance from Jane Fonda (Satan help us!) and then Lopez’s dismal attempts to reinvent herself as a dramatic actress in “An Unfinished Life” and “Bordertown.”

By the time Lopez walked away from the limelight to focus on motherhood and her marriage to Marc Anthony, the limelight had already walked away from her. In retrospect, her tenure as world-dominating movie star and pop star — and possessor of the most celebrated derrière since Aphrodite Kallipygos — was less than half a decade, from “Out of Sight” in 1998 through “Maid in Manhattan” in 2002.

So here we have a woman who is tremendously rich and famous, able to command her own business ventures and control her own destiny to a significant degree, yet who is still in search of a second act as a pop celebrity. That’s a dangerous game for a female performer approaching middle age to play (Lopez will turn 41 in July), especially when she’s trying to swim upstream against the most vicious currents of Hollywood sexism, and double-especially when her star appeal in the first place was built on evanescent qualities like beauty and charm.

If Lopez insists on using her financial muscle and production powers to shove her way back into leading-lady roles on the big screen, that can only mean more tepid embarrassments like “The Back-up Plan,” one of the most unintentionally apposite titles in movie history. What remains of Jenny From the Block’s one-time hotness is her easygoing, everygirl persona and a modest comic gift; at this point, her real backup plan should be a TV sitcom (as a recent EW article on her career plight suggested).

Instead, we get a dispiriting and thoroughly ineffective romantic comedy, with some juicy morsels provided around the edges by a great supporting cast but no heat whatever in the central coupling between Lopez and Aussie TV hunk Alex O’Loughlin (a vampire in “Moonlight” and a doctor in “Three Rivers”). Zoe (Lopez), a Manhattan pet-store proprietor — why do the single women in romantic comedies always own pet stores? Is it psychological shorthand for how lovelorn and nurturing they are? Or is it just to provide cute animal reaction shots? — meets Stan (O’Loughlin), a bad-boy cheesemaker, in a rainy-day taxi dispute right after she’s been inseminated by wisecracking OB/GYN Robert Klein.

As scripted by TV veteran Kate Angelo, Stan and Zoe’s fateful meeting is supposed to be screwball-awkward but instead comes off as skin-crawlingly uncomfortable, and despite the entirely conventional demands of the plot, the duo never seem remotely at ease with each other. When Stan announces that he’s sticking around even after learning that Zoe’s pregnant with twins who were literally fathered by a red-headed stranger, it seems willful and bizarre rather than noble and romantic, as if maybe he’s the one with compulsive baby-lust.

Speaking of weird and uncomfortable, at about the two-thirds mark in their predictable on-again, off-again romance, Zoe tells Stan: “I miss my old ass. It was like my new ass, but way hotter.” They discuss this subject for another minute or two, while Zoe fetishistically clutches an underwater photo of her in a bathing suit, taken “by her college boyfriend,” in which she’s visible only from the neck down.

What is that, a wild stab at self-deprecating humor? A collective dive into a Freudian black hole? Not only does this movie’s star look like a leaner, bionically altered version of herself, but the filmmakers call attention to that fact — and symbolically decapitate her at the same time? Now, nobody held a gun to Lopez’s head and forced her to play that scene, but you have to wonder what she thought she was doing, and what kind of advice she’s getting.

Since you bring it up, Zoe, let’s talk about the old ass and the new one. There’s no nice or polite or even entirely acceptable way to say this, but Lopez looks kind of strange in this movie. She’s been gym-toned and bronzed and highlighted and frosted and layered and processed and accessorized and hidden in drapey dresses and buried under a somewhat doggy Farrah Fawcett ‘do. You can see J.Lo in there, or someone who looks like her, from time to time, but she can’t come out and play. In close-up, Lopez’s enormous false eyelashes cast their own shadows on the set; they threaten to reach out and entwine you, like those plant-tendril 3-D thingies in “Avatar.” She is indeed less curvaceous than she once was, and she has a sort of mysterious, hardened sheen, like a cupcake left too long in the Easy-Bake Oven.

Listen, I understand that Lopez’s struggle to play a romantic leading role opposite an actor who is seven years younger, and my reaction to it, reflect a culture of pernicious sexism that judges women and men by different standards. Of course the age difference between Stan and Zoe shouldn’t matter, but you can’t make the issue disappear by pretending it doesn’t exist. A better version of “The Back-up Plan” might have used it as a comic plot point (it’s briefly hinted at) or evaded it by casting a man who wasn’t self-evidently younger. Casting a man who actually appeared to be attracted to Lopez might have been a good idea too.

More to the point, in some hypothetical good version of this movie Jennifer Lopez wouldn’t have been so desperately repackaged in a wistful, pseudo-Proustian effort to recapture the lost magic of, say, “The Wedding Planner.” (Yes, that’s a ridiculous phrase to think or type, but there you are.) Even amid the notorious sexism of showbiz, there are more opportunities than ever for women to be sexy, gorgeous, charismatic, etc., into and beyond the years of motherhood, maturity and menopause. I believe Jenny can pull it off too — but not by sitting around mourning the lost ass of yesteryear.

As for “The Back-up Plan,” the reasons to see it are all about hilarious bits by Michaela Watkins as Zoe’s borderline-intolerable loudmouth best friend, Anthony Anderson as a playground dad dispensing dire words of wisdom to Stan, and Maribeth Monroe as a member of Zoe’s support group who gives birth in a kiddie wading pool, hooting and grunting like a warthog possessed by the Wendigo. In fact, toward the end of the film Angelo and director Alan Poul sneak in a pretty funny 20-minute spoof on New Age childbirth culture and the hazards of having twins (an experience Lopez and I have in common). Zoe, Stan and the headless woman in the bathing-suit photo are reduced to bystanders, and it works better that way.