By Joshua Knopp/managing editor
I don’t know how she’s both so charming and so redundant.
I Don’t Know How She Does It, based on a book of the same name, follows Kate Reddy (Sarah Jessica Parker) as she juggles her husband and children (Greg Kinnear, Emma Rayne Lyle and Theodore and Julius Goldberg) with her career in finance. The film is shot as a mockumentary featuring friends and co-workers reminiscing on a particularly difficult three months when Parker and Kinnear both had their workloads increased at the same time.
The movie has a wonderful cast. Busy Phillips, Christina Hendricks, Seth Meyers and Olivia Munn all lend their talents and assistance in narrating, and Kelsey Grammar appears in a disappointingly limited role.
But it is Pierce Brosnan, predictably, who carries the film. The fifth James Bond works closely with Parker as they develop a proposal to supplement Social Security, and he has lost none of his charisma.
No matter how charismatic he is, however, he’s still just another iteration of Mr. Big. This issue with originality is systemic throughout I Don’t Know How She Does It. The problems Parker deals with have been portrayed in media a thousand times over, and the film doesn’t add anything to their interpretations.
The unoriginality of the storyline is compounded by the unoriginality of the subplots. Brosnan and Munn’s story arcs are main plotlines of other films taken and condensed into a fraction of the time they would need to really shine.
The movie ends with a whimper, dragging a scene that could have been one to two minutes into an eternity in an attempt to fit a reference to everything that was mentioned earlier in the movie into the final sequence.
In the end, I Don’t Know How She Does It just isn’t a meaningful film. It’s enjoyable enough while it lasts, but after the credits roll, it will be quickly forgotten.
Also, small detail — Boston gets 41 inches of snow per year. Building a snowman isn’t that important.
Final Take: A charming but useless filler movie.
Those who would enjoy it: Pierce Brosnan fans, Sarah Jessica Parker fans
