Friends with Kids
“They've watched their friends have kids. They think they've found a better way.”
Director
Jennifer Westfeldt
Release
20 June 2012
Runtime
107 Minutes
Certificate
15
Synopsis
Jason Fryman and Julie Keller are best friends living in Manhattan. Their friendship is easy. Their romantic lives are separate. Neither intends to change that. But their friendship group is changing dramatically. Their married friends Ben and Missy and Alex and Leslie are dealing with the realities of raising children, and Jason and Julie begin wondering whether romance and parenting really need to be tied together at all. Eventually they devise their own solution. Have a child together while remaining friends. No marriage. No romantic expectations. No messy divorce if things go wrong. They'll simply share responsibility for their child while continuing to date other people. For a while, their unconventional arrangement appears to work. Jason begins seeing Mary Jane, while Julie develops a relationship with Kurt. But watching the person you share a child with build a life with somebody else proves rather different from imagining it. Gradually, the boundaries Jason and Julie thought they'd established begin disappearing. The experiment they designed to remove romance from parenting forces them to confront the possibility that the relationship they were trying so carefully to avoid may have been there all along.
The Movie Trailer
Friends with Kids takes a familiar romantic-comedy question and gives it a dangerous little twist: what if two best friends decided to have a child together without becoming a couple?
Jason and Julie have known each other for years.
They're close, comfortable with one another and completely convinced that they aren't romantically compatible.
But they've also watched their married friends have children and seen relationships that once looked effortless transformed by exhaustion, arguments and responsibility.
So they come up with another idea.
They'll have a baby together.
They'll split the parenting equally.
And they'll remain free to pursue romantic relationships with other people.
On paper, it sounds remarkably sensible.
Unfortunately, relationships have a habit of getting considerably more complicated once real feelings are involved.
THE PLAN
Jason and Julie Think They've Solved Parenthood
Jason and Julie have watched their friends follow the conventional route.
Fall in love.
Get married.
Have children.
Then discover just how dramatically a baby can change a relationship.
From the outside, they think they've spotted the problem.
So they remove romance from the equation.
Their plan is almost aggressively logical: have a child together, split the responsibility equally, and keep being best friends.
Nobody gets trapped in an unhappy marriage.
Nobody sacrifices their romantic future.
And their child gets two parents who already trust each other.
There's just one flaw.
Human relationships rarely follow the rules people create for them.
FRIENDS FIRST
Having the Baby Is the Easy Part
Jason and Julie's friendship gives their experiment something many relationships struggle to achieve.
They already understand one another.
There isn't a courtship period or a battle to discover how the other person thinks.
They simply become parents.
But their familiarity also makes it hard to recognise when the relationship begins to change.
They can explain away intimacy as friendship.
They can date other people because that was always part of the arrangement.
And they can pretend jealousy doesn't matter because neither was supposed to become jealous in the first place.
The closer they become as parents, the harder it becomes to maintain the emotional distance their entire plan depends upon.
LOVE & LOGIC
You Can't Write Rules for Falling in Love
The central joke of Friends with Kids is also its central problem.
Jason and Julie believe they've designed a smarter relationship.
They've looked at the mistakes everyone around them has made and created a system to avoid them.
But love isn't particularly interested in systems.
Their experiment gradually exposes the difference between understanding somebody intellectually and recognising what they actually mean to you.
Jason and Julie can define themselves as friends.
They can create rules.
They can even build relationships with other people.
What they can't control is how they feel when the person who understands them better than almost anybody else begins moving towards a life that may no longer include them.