Simple Solutions: Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin find marital reunion, if not bliss, in 'It’s Complicated'.

Nothing too complicated about It’s Complicated – it’s just as much an entertainment formula as the Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, the main difference being that it’s aimed at that audience’s grandparents.

Jane (Meryl Streep) runs a successful (what else?) Santa Barbara restaurant and bakery but she’s unhappy, a lonely divorcee. Streep most often plays “a successful” character these days (the mother superior in Doubt notwithstanding). She’s a major star despite being of a certain age, and she’s earned the right to portray characters tailored to flattering specifications if that’s what she wants.

Joan Crawford portrayed a successful restaurant owner in Mildred Pierce, but Mildred’s daughter ended up cheating on her with her mother’s man – none of that rough stuff for Streep’s Jane.

If some producers want a divorcee that lives in a trailer, works a minimum-wage job, and has to smuggle illegals across the frozen Canadian border in order to pay her bills, they call Melissa Leo. But if they’re looking for someone to play a woman who owns a thriving resto, lives in a beautiful rambling ranch house set into the Santa Barbara hills, has three almost-grown, soon-to-be-successful children, and yet pines for that masculine presence that’s missing from her life, Streep’s the smart choice.

It’s Complicated is written and directed by Nancy Meyers, whose bubbly chick flicks have set a dubious but, yes, successful standard in lightweight romantic comedy fare (Private Benjamin, Baby Boom, Father of the Bride, etc.) about women getting into the kind of trouble most women can only dream about.

Jane’s predicament is this: Her ex-husband, a well-fed lawyer named Jake (Alec Baldwin), decides that he misses Jane’s talents – in bed as well as in the kitchen – and so when they coincide in New York for their son’s college graduation, they accidentally on purpose start an affair.

Divorced ex-mates reuniting adulterously, tsk tsk. Jake’s current wife is a young harpy named Agness (Lake Bell), and we can see instantly that they’re wrong together. We might say Jake deserves Agness for cheating on Jane in the first place, but let’s let that pass for a moment.

Also courting Jane is Adam, a meek, defeated architect (an unusually subdued Steve Martin) who’s helping her add a new wing onto her home. Adam clearly needs someone like Jane, and Jake wants to get back to her home-style pies, but Jane doesn’t quite know what she wants.

If anyone other than Streep, Baldwin, and Martin were playing these cardboard characters, we’d retch. But amazingly, the actors win us over. There’s a moral to this story, too: As Mr. Natural once advised, get the right tools for the job.

IT’S COMPLICATED (3) Directed by Nancy Meyers • Starring Meryl Street, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin • Rated R • 118 min • At Century Cinemas Del Monte Center, Maya Cinemas.