James L. Brooks hasn’t exactly bombarded the cineplex with features as a director — or as a writer or producer for that matter. As an executive producer on “The Simpsons” I guess he can afford that luxury, not to mention the early directorial successes of Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good as It Gets. Those three films garnered 25 Oscar nominations and seven wins. Brooks won for Best Director and Screenplay for Terms of Endearment, which also took home Best Picture. However, since 1997 we’ve only seen one film, Spanglish, and that’s all it has taken for the film community to begin to sour.
Personally, I enjoyed Spanglish. Certainly more than others that found it to be schmaltzy with the dramedy of a sitcom. To each their own, but I will happily use that comparison for Brooks’s latest film, How Do You Know, but not as some overly negative description. How Do You Know is a lot like a sitcom,. It’s one wacky moment after another, with those brief moments of earnestness you typically find from series such as “Friends,” which started out as a straight-up situational comedy, but evolved as the audience grew closer to its characters into something more serious.
Depending on your viewpoint, the characters in How Do You Know will either work or they won’t, there’s little room for in-between seeing how these aren’t necessarily “real” people in the sense they don’t behave as people you come across on a daily basis. Especially considering their circumstances.
George (Paul Rudd) works for his father (Jack Nicholson) and he’s currently under indictment. He and his father’s relationship is tense to say the least. Lisa (Reese Witherspoon) is a recently dismissed member of the Team USA softball team and she’s dating Matty (Owen Wilson), a self-centered major league baseball player with a sexual drive as powerful as his ignorance. This quartet makes up a nearly two-hour hodgepodge of a feature that has its major ups and downs and while the comedy is limited I never reached a point where I hated what I was watching.
Rudd’s performance is of two modes, off and on. He’s either doing what he’s shown he can do in such films as I Love You, Man and Role Models, or he just appears to be reading lines. His performance opposite Jack Nicholson is incredibly weak, but then again so is Jack’s. Jack is playing Jack and he was obviously cast for that very reason. His first and last scenes in the film use the fact it’s Jack to sell the joke and it almost works.
Wilson’s character is an overactive libido with a mouth and he gets most of the film’s laughs as his character stays true throughout. In his script Brooks takes most of the known issues that cause couples to break up and uses Matty as a test subject. In doing so the film’s narrative is given a voice and Matty is given a chance. He’s dumb enough to the point he doesn’t realize he’s being insensitive.
Witherspoon fits comfortably into the middle of all of this. She’s Rachel to Rudd and Wilson’s Ross and Joey. She gets to act drunk, sad, mad and cute and she pulls it off easily. This isn’t the most trying of roles, however, but she certainly doesn’t drag the film down.
The two best performances of the flick come from Kathryn Hahn and Lenny Venito. Hahn plays Rudd’s pregnant assistant who’s legally not allowed to discuss the ongoing investigation and Lenny plays Al, the father of Hahn’s child. For the most part Hahn plays the goofy and caring supporting role (one you’d often see filled by Judy Greer), but near the end of the film (and when it probably should have ended) Hahn and Venito put together the film’s best scene… That is until Brooks ruins it in a way I won’t ruin for you here.
How Do You Know is by no means the film you’d expect from an Oscar-wining screenwriter and director, but it is the film you’d expect from a writer of “The Simpsons”. These aren’t insults, it’s a matter of mindset. It’s hard to hate this film because its intentions are good, even if they are pulled off with the dexterity of an amateur. It certainly doesn’t stand out from the pack, but it is a serviceable rom-com, albeit one on the middle-to-lower rung.
