Parents' Guide to MILF

This movie is tasteless and idiotic, with hardly a character to like. It's not troubling or in any way abnormal that 30-year-old men would find 50-year-old women attractive and vice versa. And it's wonderful that women like the ones here seem to feel comfortable in their own skins, but this is not the point of the movie. Perhaps the goal is to provide a counterpoint to scores of movies about older men coupling with younger women. But MILF doesn't even accomplish that.

Unlike other films about younger men an older women -- good ones including The Graduate, Adoration, Unfaithful, and Notes on a Scandal -- there's no cleverness, wit, humor, or empathy here. Apart from one smitten young man who wants to have a serious relationship and raise a child with a woman 20 years his senior, there's hardly a sympathetic character to root for. A woman is mocked for her tight pants and the "camel toe" they cause, yet, though a side character, she turns out to be the nicest, kindest, savviest, and most admirable person in the film. One younger man boasts of his conquest and offers details after he's had sex with Elise. Once he's had her, he tires and drops her, admitting that he's a jerk, then flirting with other women right in front of her. That the forty-something women want to have anything to do with the crass, brutish, idiotic guys who keep reducing women they see to sexual objects is puzzling, suggesting that the women have little or no self esteem, a possibility that's not explored. Perhaps it's unfair to ask that this movie try to be intelligent, sensitive, moving, or emotionally astute. Candid sexuality can play an important role in good movies. That's not what's happening here.