 Romcoms are fun. Reese Witherspoon is absolutely adorable, and James L. Brooks gave this world the biggest gift in entertainment: The Simpsons. Put ‘em all together and what you should get is a hilariously funny, totally touching film. What you do get is a film that is painted over with a big fat WTF?. How Do You Know is not a bad movie. It’s a movie that’s okay. The characters are okay, the plot is okay, the dialogues are okay. But the thing is, how many of us really want to labeled just ‘okay’?
The poor and very uninteresting man’s Jerry Maguire, HDYK has three pivotal characters whose lives become interlinked through perfectly ordinary events. Lisa (Witherspoon) is dating Matty (Wilson) and George (Rudd) calls her to call off a blind date that was never set up. It’s all very simple and innocent and fun and you know everything is going to just crash and burn like Lindsay Lohan on a Friday night. That’s really because the film sells itself by touting Lisa as a woman who has been dropped from the USA baseball team and is feeling “past her prime” at 31. There you have your 26-35 female demographic who might connect to Lisa’s character.
Then you have Matty, who is also a ball player, a little self obsessed, but really likes Lisa. Because he has pink women’s sweats and new toothbrushes all lined up in his bathroom to facilitate his frequent lady friends, we are forced to suspect that Lisa will never end up with Matty. Or that beneath his little boy charm, we will soon discover a sociopath. Either way, it’s clear from the very outset that Lisa will ultimately be made supremely unhappy by Matty someday. Don’t think of this as a spoiler, think of it as the ultimate truth of any romcom.
George is totally having a Jerry Maguire moment, as he is under federal investigation and his girlfriend tells him to call her when everything is over. However, George does not suddenly rise from the ashes of his possibly dead forever career, but kind of plods through the motions of getting by during a crisis, which is very realistic. Although it could’ve been made a bit more interesting to watch. But whatever. Ladies, you know your vote is with George in this love triangle because he is the nice guy. Also because he is Paul Rudd. And a nice guy who looks like Paul Rudd will always get everybody’s vote.
 This brings us to Lisa, the object of these men’s affection. Reese Witherspoon has proved over time that she can act. And that she is particularly comfortable with and good at chick friendly movies. She does the whole cutesy thing really well, and from her essaying of Jill Green on Friends we also know she can do the bimbette/bitch thing really well too. Oh and there was Election, so we know Reese can pull off being hardnosed and ambitious. In HDYK, you see none of that. Reese kind of half-heartedly gives playing Lisa a shot. There are quick snappy exchanges between her and her two admirers and sporadically other people, and there are long silences in which she is supposed to simply emote. That doesn’t really happen though. She kind of ends up looking like she is spacing out a little in the middle of a highly emotional moment. So yeah, this film is really not working out for anyone too well. However, Reese Witherspoon and HDYK escape being as random as that other queen of romcom, Kate Hudson and any of the films that she is in so that is something to applaud (which is not saying much).
When all these characters interact with each other there is no magic. There is no spark. There is not even an ordinary little peep. Yes, the idea could have been to paint people and relationships as believably as possible, but how many of us, when wrapped in our own emotional drama find it mundane? Plus you’re translating from real life to screen, you have to have that extra something that will make the most ho-hum situations pop.
Also, just to make clear everybody’s emotional history, Lisa doesn’t believe in love and marriage and finds herself only very good at her sports career, and George has a lout for a father and a mother who abandoned them when he was seven. So you know the underlying message is to sort of overcome your fears and embrace life. Or something. I’m still trying to figure out what this film is trying to say, if anything, and if it was a film just for the sake of telling a story, then where was the story? For a more spunky Rudd-Witherspoon film, watch Overnight Delivery, which may not be a work of art, but has some kind of life to it.
-- Amina Baig
*CINEMATIC SUICIDE
**FORGETTABLE
***WATCHABLE
****COLLECTIBLE
*****AWARD-WORTH |
