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“It’s Complicated” is a comedy about middle-aged sex, but with more rom-com urges than absurd ones. It’s from writer-chief Nancy Meyers, who has found a comfort zone in gentle, even tepid comedies about elder adults facing complications that re-lead their lives into pleasantly unexpected emotional channels. “Complicated” forges upfront with these themes. Because no one moreover in Hollywood seemingly makes movies for internal-aged moviegoers, especially women, Meyers inevitably scores box-agency successes, and this one should kiln ahead in that spot, too. Universal releases the skin Christmas Day.

What Meyers doesn’t do take chances. She brushwood to formula and predictability. In “Complicated,” this is as much a matter of casting as symbols.

Meryl Streep, apparently not slaughter any cooking education she had for “Julie & Julia,” drama a divorced landlord/quiche chef of a successful Santa Barbara bakery/restaurant. She is only now launch to language with her split from Alec Baldwin, who dumped her 10 being formerly for a, much younger lady. Even so, shopping for synthetic surgery and building an expansion to her rural house imply a certain restlessness although her apparent equanimity.

The graduation of one of their three adult children on the East Coast throws her together with her ex when his spouse (Lake Bell) isn’t around. Wine flows, sparks fly and — you would never deduce, but then again, you possibly will — the two launch an impromptu, drunken matter. Suddenly, Streep is the “other” woman.

Nevertheless the casting foreshadows most of the dramatic turns. Baldwin has urban a instant career in films and television by more or fewer spoofing his macho figure. So his creature, a comic exaggeration of chap befuddlement with womankind, is never a credible life pick for the restaurateur. Then, too, Steve Martin has just walked in: He’s the planner who is leaving to change her life with that home extension, and you know, even though he’s more subdued than you might assume, that he isn’t in the legend to converse the importance of retaining stockade.

In the tape comedy world dominated by Judd Apatow, Meyer’s idea of naughtiness is charmingly peculiar. The older adults — bury this from the kids — smoke pot! Yes, they do. Streep drops her robe to expose her over-50-year-old body just as Diane Keaton did in Meyers’ “Something’s Gotta Give.” (No, of course you don’t see anything.) The film’s certainly racy instant comes when Baldwin’s concealed parts are accidentally Skyped to an unwilling viewer.

The near-silly exercises by the parents in and around their kids (Caitlin Fitzgerald, Zoe Kazan and Hunter Parrish) and one prospective son-in-law (John Krasinski) and the shocked/delighted reactions to the issue by her gal pals (Rita Wilson, Mary Kay Place, Alexandra Wentworth, Nora Dunn) get milked for all promising laughs they will yield.

What Meyers has free for her in all the films she has directed from her scripts is her ability to remind a fantasy world where developed men can cry and apprehend their mistakes while developed women like them for that. Cynicism — heartfelt sarcasm, not the catty, superficial kind espoused by the First Wives Club chorus — is banished, and rightful like still is a possibility.

To anything level the writer-boss is rewriting her own life buzz, fatefully she is liability so for countless heart-aged women, and possibly more than a few guys who necessary to swallow all the pills Baldwin’s makeup does to get through the day.

This is a comfort zone for such audience even if the characters are no more true than the models in Vanity Fair ads. Streep is a prophecy of mature loveliness, a smart, sexy mom who always knows the right stuff to say to the kids and how to extricate herself from embarrassing situations. Far from the genuine world, she lives in a multimillion-money home, can — after a fitting number of comic mishaps — make meaning of her life and even get Skype to work without having to consult younger family members.

Idea by REUTERS