In adolescence and a few years beyond that, many of us have rolled our eyes and pretended to vomit when on-screen couples over the age of 35 started kissing. Yucky, indecent, pathetic! — we didn't know where to look. But having gotten there myself and been informed that 40 is the new 20 and 50 is the new 30 and 60 is also the new 30 . . . well gosh.
It's great news but nevertheless a teensy bit disconcerting to see how an increasing number of romantic films these days are performed by and geared toward what we used to know as the midlife demographic. Forty-something Sandra Bullock in "The Proposal" fakes a marriage with a guy of 25. Alan Arkin in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee" is an 80-year-old retiree married to a woman 30 years his junior and has an affair with her much younger friend. Just contemplating such plots would have given my grandparents (who both held that decrepitude set in at 42 and remained unto death) a couple of strokes each.
The latest antiage story charged up on rocket fuel is "It's Complicated," in which 50-something divorcees romp in and out of hotel beds and smooch in elevators and get high on reefers. It wasn't so long ago that we saw this same age group worried about encroaching old age or plagued by the needs of irate offspring and/or senile parents. But in the past five years, movie characters of certain ages have decidedly become more prosperous, less stressed and awesomely libidinous. The once painful prospect of "growing older" is tinged with rosy-pink possibilities. Which is probably a cause for celebration. Or is it?