Bad Therapy

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Bob Howard (Rob Corddry) is married to Susan (Alicia Silverstone). He wants to have a baby; she's not so sure, and rightly so – a pregnancy at Silverstone's 43 years of age might be dangerous, not to mention that by the time the child turns 21, Corddry will be 70. It slowly dawned on me that Corddry and Silverstone are, on paper, playing characters much younger than themselves. Bob and Susan attend couples therapy with Dr. Judy Small (Michaela Watkins), and Susan says she married her late first husband and had daughter Louisa (Anna Pniowsky) in college. This would put her in her in the early-to-mid-30s range. She also says that Bob was 39 when they got married, and Bob says they've been married for three years, so he would be 42 instead of Corddry's 49. I've loved Alicia ever since Clueless and the Aerosmith videos, but neither she nor Corddry are young enough or good enough actors to get us to suspend our disbelief about their characters' ages. This isn't the biggest leap of faith Bad Therapy hopes we'll make, though; on top of that he expects us to believe that Corddry is, in the words of Judy Small (for some reason everyone keeps calling her by her full name name; this the movie's idea of a running gag), "an extremely attractive man" – to the point that three beautiful women such as Silverstone, Watkins, and Sarah Shahi succumb to his charms. Who knows? Maybe he has the kavorka. If the movie were the least bit interesting or entertaining, its protagonists' ages would matter little. Unfortunately, Bad Therapy forces us to focus on such petty details to keep ourselves from thinking about its horrible characters – especially Bob, whose implicit and explicit sleaziness is the movie's ruin. Here's a man who would have happily cheated on his wife twice, and only stops short of the actual deed because he's interrupted both times – and yet we're supposed to feel good for Susan when she reconciles with him. The most inexplicable and unforgivable aspect of the movie, however, is when Susan suggests that Bob has started seeing 13-year-old Louise in a not-so-fatherly way. Even if the film had been on the right track before – and it never was – this is a blow from which it could never recover. The notion is abandoned almost as soon as it is introduced – which makes it even more disconcerting –, but the stench of pedophilia lingers in the air and, unless you're Todd Solondz, that is not the mood you want your comedy to evoke (incidentally, Pniowsky is the only one who survives this disaster with her dignity intact).