Emotionally Dishonest How Do You Know a Downward Spiral
At 31-years-old, Lisa (Reese Witherspoon) has just found herself cut from the U.S. women’s softball team. Adrift, sports has been the thing that has defined her since childhood, and now that she’s been cutoff from that she’s not entirely sure where to go from here, especially considering her selfish, somewhat narcissistic professional baseball playing boyfriend Matty (Owen Wilson) isn’t big on the emotional support front.
Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson in How Do You Know © Columbia Pictures
George (Paul Rudd) is an honest, straight-talking businessman who has just been told he’s under suspicion for wrongdoing and corporate malfeasance by the F.C.C. The CEO of his father Charles’ (Jack Nicholson), who remains the chairman of the board, business, he’s both bewildered and blindsided by this news, sure that his life is over and he’s completely at a loss as to how or why this has happened to him.
How Do You Know is an interesting, sometimes exhilarating, failure. Written and directed by the once-great James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, As Good as It Gets), the movie never quite knows what it is or has a very good idea of where it is going. It is a saga of broken or in the process of breaking individuals searching for reasons to keep moving forward, and while that sort of thing should be right up the multiple Oscar-winner’s sleeve for whatever reason this time out he drops the ball.
In short spurts, this thing can border on genius. There are individual scenes, like a great one where Lisa and George meet on a blind date and resort to silence to make a connection, that held me spellbound, moments where I was positive Brooks would find away to bring all his distaff tangents together in a cohesive way. Problem is, he doesn’t, and for every wonderful dollop of dialogue, juicy character bit or dab of introspective wit there are at least a half dozen other sequences that hit the floor with a distracting thud. There is nothing natural about the movie, nothing real, and as much as I wanted to cut it some slack scene after scene would come apart at the seams making that impossible.
It does not help that neither Matty, for all Wilson’s valiant attempts otherwise, or Charles, even with Jack unleashing that trademark grin, aren’t all that fun to be around. It becomes increasingly difficult to understand what Lisa sees in the former or why George allows the latter to keep controlling his life, both nothing more than one-dimensional fall guys on hand only to make the two sad-sack heroes miserable.
And that misery can get a little wearing. I’m glad that Brooks wanted to tell a story of two people heading on a downward spiral; like that he wanted to do this in a way that would be more or less stripped of artifice. Problem is, both are so full of odd quirks and ticks, their mannerisms so odd and distracting, as hard as both Witherspoon and especially Rudd try it’s hard to see what Lisa and George see in one another. Their friendship just isn’t believable, and while sparks can pass between them (there’s a great cell conversation just past the midpoint that had me pleasantly spellbound) just because that’s so it doesn’t then mean I found their subsequent romantic ponderings authentic.
This movie mystifies me a little bit. After this and Spanglish, I’m wondering if Brooks is maybe losing his touch. Both films are disjointed and hollow, neither rising to a place of emotional resonance like some of the writer and director’s past works have. What’s worse, in the case of How Do You Know it almost seems as if the filmmaker isn’t even confident in himself anymore, repeating some scenes multiple times in a row for no apparent reason that I could easily surmise.
Case in point (and this is something of a minor spoiler, so be warned): There is a winning moment in a hospital room, George dragging Lisa along with him to his former assistant Annie’s (Kathryn Hahn) bedside in order to wish her congratulations on the birth of her son. Out of nowhere comes a surprising marriage proposal, the two friends witnessing a moment of truth, caring and love that’s as honest as it is beautiful. It is an incredible scene, maybe the best in the entire movie, but for no reason then to interject a couple of quick laughs Brooks reruns the sequence a second time, George and Lisa interjecting the spur of the moment dialogue that Annie and her new finance can’t recollect.
Doing this dilutes the truth of the moment, making it inauthentic and false. While it does produce a couple of giggles it ultimately kills the emotion generated by the sequence at the very same time. More than that, the film is full of weird, oddly perplexing decisions like this one that stall out the momentum and erase any sort of accrued goodwill. Over and over How Do You Know kept shooting itself in the foot, butchering my interest and demolishing my emotional investment to the point I almost wondered why I was still sitting in the theatre watching it.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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