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Heartbroken after being dumped by his actress girlfriend, 26-year-old soft-core porn writer Carter Webb (Adam Brody) decides to pack up and head for Michigan, to spend some time caring for his aging grandmother, Phyllis (Olympia Dukakis), who’s convinced that she’s dying. Once he arrives, he discovers that his grandma is completely nuts—and she’s obsessed with her own death. He’s afraid that running so far away from his problems might have only made things worse—until he meets the Hardwickes, who live across the street.
Sarah (Meg Ryan) is a stay-at-home wife and mother of two who really needs a friend. Though she has a good life, she feels that her life is not her own. It belongs to her two daughters and her husband, who’s been cheating on her. And now that she’s discovered a lump in her breast, she’s starting to wonder what her life was all about.
Sarah’s daughter, Lucy (Kristen Stewart), is a typical angry, insecure teenager. She’s dating the school’s football quarterback, but she’s afraid of getting close to him—or any boy, for that matter—and she blames her mom.
Both Hardwicke women are drawn to new guy across the street. They find that he’s great to talk to—and he needs a friend just as much as they do. And, for some reason, they both end up opening up to him more than they would to anyone else.
In the Land of Women isn’t really about the story as much as it is about the characters. The problem, though, is that the characters aren’t all that interesting. The only character who has any kind of real personality is Phyllis, the crazy grandma, who probably has a little too much personality—because she’s so over-the-top that she makes the rest of the cast look even more dull than they actually are. You’d think that Carter, as a porn writer from California, would at least be a little bit quirky, but there’s nothing really out of the ordinary about him. He’s just some guy. And Lucy is just some girl. She’s just another teenager with some issues that never really make all that much sense.
While Meg Ryan’s role is supposed to be a minor one, she ends up stealing the show—because although her character isn’t really given much depth, either, at least she manages to breathe some life into the role. And, well, she’s Meg Ryan. While we haven’t really seen much of her lately (or at least not much good), the second she appears on the screen, you can’t help but fall in love with her all over again. And thanks to the magic of Botox, she will never, ever age.
Though I didn’t find myself looking at my watch throughout the movie, I didn’t find it especially gripping, either. There are some touching moments, but, in general, nothing really happens. It’s just a few people talking for a while, and then it’s over. There isn’t really much resolution in the end—and though viewers are supposed to get the feeling that the characters learned and grew from the experience, you won’t really know what, exactly, they learned or how, exactly, they grew. And that makes it a Land that this Woman didn’t care to inhabit.
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