Lisa is a woman whose athletic ability is the defining passion of her life, having been her focus since early childhood. When she is cut from her team, everything she has ever known is suddenly taken from her. Not knowing what to do, she stumbles toward regular life. In this mode, she begins a fling with Matty, a major league baseball pitcher, a self-centered ladies man -- a narcissist with a code of honor. George is a straight-arrow businessman whose complicated relationship with his father, Charles, takes a turn when George is accused of a financial crime, even though he's done nothing wrong. Though he may be headed to jail, George's honesty, integrity, and unceasing optimism may be his only path to keeping his sanity. Before Lisa's relationship with Matty takes root, she meets George for a first date on the worst evening of each of their lives: she has just been cut, and he has just been served. When everything else seems to be falling apart, they will discover what it means to have something wonderful happen.
Genres: Comedy, Drama and Sports Running Time: 1 hr. 56 min. Release Date: December 17th, 2010 (wide) MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content and some strong language. Distributor: Sony Pictures Releasing
Cast And Credits
Starring:
Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, Jack Nicholson
Directed by:
James L. Brooks
Produced by:
John D. Schofield, Richard Sakai
In “How Do You Know,” a romantic comedy about missed opportunities, scripted and otherwise, Reese Witherspoon wears an industrial-strength smile and a laser twinkle that looks as if it’s set on kill. Although she’s routinely cast in frothy fare, Ms. Witherspoon comes with a hard, intimidating edge that most directors ignore. Maybe she prefers light and lovely over dark and dangerous. But as she showed in Alexander Payne’s 1999 comedy, “Election,” in which she played a ferocious high-school climber in a dazzling performance that has hung over her career like an unmet dare, she can be a beautiful menace.
In “How Do You Know,” an airless, sometimes distressingly mirthless comedy written and directed by James L. Brooks, Ms. Witherspoon plays Lisa, a softball player with world-class aspirations who fails to make the cut, an unfortunate story line for a movie with the same problem.
The bad news arrives not long into the movie, furnishing her with a potential existential dilemma — she’s a 31-year-old athlete without obvious prospects — that Mr. Brooks has little interest in exploring. So instead, he dries her tears and piles on the romantic complications, loading her with smiles and sighs, exits and entrances, and cramming this busy yet uneventful movie with the kind of laugh lines built for laugh tracks.
Lisa’s romantic complications come in two flavors: vanilla and butterscotch. She almost samples the first, a pale, soft-serve businessman working in some vague capacity named George (Paul Rudd), after a mutual friend tries to hook them up. George has his own troubles, including a federal investigation and an overbearing father (an alarmingly unhealthy-looking and wheezing Jack Nicholson) who’s also his boss.
George is a nice guy, or so the movie insists, again and again. By the time he calls her, Lisa already seems under the spell of Matty (Owen Wilson), a major-league pitcher with lots of dough and a softly cracked attitude toward life. So George strikes out and strikes out again, though of course not for long.
As it happens, Mr. Brooks has more predictable taste in men than his female characters do. Albert Brooks’s flop-sweating reporter might have been perfect for Holly Hunter’s motor-mouthed television producer in the filmmaker’s most successful comedy, “Broadcast News,” but it was William Hurt’s dry-look anchor who (temporarily) got the girl. Once again, Mr. Brooks (the filmmaker) tips the scales, mostly because he seems to have mistaken the appealing, featherweight Mr. Rudd for a romantic lead. Mr. Wilson might not have the seriousness (or self-seriousness) of a William Hurt, but he holds your interest with his idiosyncratic, off-rhythm charm and delivery. He’s a live wire, and when he’s onscreen the movie jumps.
For the most part, though, it just sits there, idling in neutral, as lines are delivered and bodies listlessly moved. The generic quality of the title — yes, indeed, how does anyone know — extends to every other facet in the production. The three main characters talk and talk, save for one dinner of cutely enforced quiet between Lisa and George, and generally sound as if they just got out of therapy: they process rather than converse. Yet perhaps because Mr. Brooks doesn’t want to get too heavy, even when the story lists toward the weighty, much of the dialogue comes in tiny, epigrammatic bites not much bigger and certainly no deeper than the affirmations that Lisa has scribbled on Post-its and stuck on her bathroom mirror.
Bringing Love to Strong Women (December 12, 2010) “How Do You Know” is so wan and disconnected to anything that feels like real life or, just as good, a screwball interpretation of it that it’s hard to know what Mr. Brooks was really after, other than passing the time with some talented movie people. This lack of urgency and purpose proves toughest on Ms. Witherspoon, who, partly because she’s the strongest or most obviously determined actor in this little group, seems incapable of goofing her way through the movie. Mr. Rudd and Mr. Wilson have no such problem. Curiously, all three are outshone by a pair of character actors — Kathryn Hahn, who plays George’s secretary, Annie, and Lenny Venito, as her boyfriend — who, in an overworked, overwritten hospital scene, show you what love looks like simply by, surprise, good acting.
In “How Do You Know,” a romantic comedy about missed opportunities, scripted and otherwise, Reese Witherspoon wears an industrial-strength smile and a laser twinkle that looks as if it’s set on kill. Although she’s routinely cast in frothy fare, Ms. Witherspoon comes with a hard, intimidating edge that most directors ignore. Maybe she prefers light and lovely over dark and dangerous. But as she showed in Alexander Payne’s 1999 comedy, “Election,” in which she played a ferocious high-school climber in a dazzling performance that has hung over her career like an unmet dare, she can be a beautiful menace. 
The bad news arrives not long into the movie, furnishing her with a potential existential dilemma — she’s a 31-year-old athlete without obvious prospects — that Mr. Brooks has little interest in exploring. So instead, he dries her tears and piles on the romantic complications, loading her with smiles and sighs, exits and entrances, and cramming this busy yet uneventful movie with the kind of laugh lines built for laugh tracks. 
As it happens, Mr. Brooks has more predictable taste in men than his female characters do. Albert Brooks’s flop-sweating reporter might have been perfect for Holly Hunter’s motor-mouthed television producer in the filmmaker’s most successful comedy, “Broadcast News,” but it was William Hurt’s dry-look anchor who (temporarily) got the girl. Once again, Mr. Brooks (the filmmaker) tips the scales, mostly because he seems to have mistaken the appealing, featherweight Mr. Rudd for a romantic lead. Mr. Wilson might not have the seriousness (or self-seriousness) of a William Hurt, but he holds your interest with his idiosyncratic, off-rhythm charm and delivery. He’s a live wire, and when he’s onscreen the movie jumps. 
Bringing Love to Strong Women (December 12, 2010) “How Do You Know” is so wan and disconnected to anything that feels like real life or, just as good, a screwball interpretation of it that it’s hard to know what Mr. Brooks was really after, other than passing the time with some talented movie people. This lack of urgency and purpose proves toughest on Ms. Witherspoon, who, partly because she’s the strongest or most obviously determined actor in this little group, seems incapable of goofing her way through the movie. Mr. Rudd and Mr. Wilson have no such problem. Curiously, all three are outshone by a pair of character actors — Kathryn Hahn, who plays George’s secretary, Annie, and Lenny Venito, as her boyfriend — who, in an overworked, overwritten hospital scene, show you what love looks like simply by, surprise, good acting.
