Life as We Know It Not Worth Living
Set up by their best friends Peter (Hayes MacArthur) and Allison Novak (Christina Hendricks) on a blind date, it only takes a few moments for burgeoning restaurateur Holly Berenson (Katherine Heigl) and Atlanta Hawks broadcast tech Eric Messer (Josh Duhamel) to realize they can’t stand one another. Yet even though this date fails they stick by their two friends through thick and thin, suffering through one another’s company during the wedding, at the birth of the pair’s daughter Sophie and at various parties and gatherings Peter and Allison always seem to be inviting them to.
Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel in Life as We Know It © Warner Bros.
One day both get the worst phone call of their lives. Peter and Allison are dead leaving Sophie an orphan. They are both understandably devastated, but that sadness quickly turns to confusion when they’re informed that as the child’s godparents their late friends expressly stated in their will they wanted Holly and Eric to raise their daughter in the event of their deaths.
Now the two are living in a house struck by tragedy trying to do their best all without letting their mutual disdain for one another color their growing parenting skills. With Child Protective Services keeping a watchful eye, both adults discover their growing love for Sophie is starting to bleed into their feelings for one another. Now Peter and Allison have to decide not only what’s best for them but also for the child their trying to raise, a romantic relationship between two previously content singles who once hated one another maybe the last thing this non-nuclear family needs.
I have to admit upfront that the positively dreadful trailers for the new romantic tearjerker melodrama Life as We Know It had me longing to do anything other than watch the actual finished film they were trying to sell. I’ve found them to be perfectly odious, and whomever in Warner Bros.’ marketing department was in charge of putting them together should be given a swift reprimand and kept a watchful eye on.
On the plus side the movie is one heck of a lot better than those trailers remotely suggested. Both Duhamel and Heigl frequently rise about the material and make something slightly interesting out of it, Ian Deitchman and Kristin Rusk Robinson’s script even having a handful of meaningful insights that caught me more than a bit off guard. Greg Berlanti’s workmanlike direction – his skills behind the camera have improved substantially since 2000’s inconsequential The Broken Hearts Club – rarely gets in the way, the filmmaker taking a mostly hands-off approach that allowing his leads at least a tiny bit of room to breath.
Now that I’ve said all that, let me be perfectly clear: Life as We Know It is very poor motion picture. For all its few strength and rare highpoints, overall this a cliché, melodramatic throwback that’s more “Happy Days” than it is Imitation of Life, more “Malcolm in the Middle” than Terms of Endearment. All that’s missing from this feature-length sitcom is a laugh track, everything working on prepared beats and notes that are so overly familiar and obvious they’re downright freeze-dried.
Pity, because there really is a halfway decent little story with actors more than prepared to give their all to the effort desperately trying to make its voice heard here. Once you get past the contrived nature of the setup, the central conceit is actually a tiny bit intriguing. Heigl and Duhamel dance their way around one another with relative ease, and the idea these polar opposites might be perfect for one another isn’t a total stretch. On top of that, the script throws in another potentially interesting character in the form of a down to earth pediatrician wonderfully underplayed by Josh Lucas, some of the best and most honest lines in the entire film coming via him.
But for every moment of truth there are at least a half dozen others that reek of tired mediocrity. From the overly colorful Greek Chorus of neighbors (including Melissa McCarthy from the new show “Mike & Molly”) to so many poop, pee and vomit jokes I lost count of them all, so much of this made me cringe I felt like I was sitting in the theatre in a perpetual slouch. It was almost as if Berlanti and company didn’t trust the audience to be able to handle the inherent dramatics of the scenario unless they didn’t throw in a joke every few seconds, and instead of making a romantic drama with an occasional laugh they’ve instead constructed a two hour sitcom that drowns in its own mediocrity.
It’s the climactic last act that ultimately did me in. For a brief moment I started to think the filmmakers were going to go in a direction other than the obvious one, were going to do something heartfelt and believable that could transform this sow’s ear into a silk purse. But instead they once again take the easy way out, and although Lucas has one heck of a great speech and Duhamel manages some of his very best dramatic work ever the whole last 15 minutes are so forced and false I could have cared less.
I will say that the preview audience I watched it with was for the most part drowning in their own tears, eating up all this hokum with a ferocity that was somewhat surprising. Just because that’s so, however, that doesn’t mean I have to give this mangy mongrel of a cliché melodrama any more love than I have to. For all its potential Life as We Know It never got my pulse racing, and the only thing truly positive I can say is that thankfully it’s doubtful I’ll ever have to sit through it in its entirety ever again.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
Additional Links
