I think it’s only prudent to be wary of films that purport to take on the whole notion of, say, a woman juggling the demands of work and family while paying little attention to the equally immediate demands of plot and character and the credibility of each. The question in my mind is how far can a movie go out of bounds in authenticity before even its modest merits diminish?
With the arrival of I Don’t Know How She Does It I think we have some answers. Shoddy comes to mind. So does waste of talent (Pierce Brosnan). A few scenes are putrid in heir brazen, sit-comish, anything-goes, let’s throw it against the wall and see if it sticks-ness. A film so little feminist that its main character ends up finally throwing her hands up and resigning herself to being a Mom and letting the career go…it’s just not worth it…until Deus Es Machine intervenes.
I’d recount the plot but I’d have to relive it. Suffice it to say, it’s drivel on the order of an earnest, innocent woman (Sarah Jessica Parker) with an investment bank gig and a wasted-in-this-film, very good Greg Kinnear as her husband. She gets an unexpected promotion that forces her to commute to New York and work with The Big Boss Brosnan quite a bit. Her in tow assistant Olivia Munn is a no-nonsense Wharton grad who forces Parker to do things like comb her hair and act more business-like, while swearing she herself will never have kids (guess what’s coming there?)…Phony as in Holden Caulfield-phony comes to mind. Although they get a lot of the child rearing stuff right, everything about the “business” stuff is pure hooey. Brosnan, so effective an actor in The Ghost Writer, seems to have taken the day off with this role. And Parker is so studiously quirky she seems to be goofing on herself the entire time. Speaking
of goofy, I’d be crazy to go on any longer.
2 This-One’s-Meant-for-Oprah’s Out of 10
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