Early in her career, Sarah Jessica Parker showed sly comic charm in Woody Allen-ish riffs like L.A. Story (where she played an exuberant ditz) and Miami Rhapsody (where she basically played Woody Allen); Sex and the City was a natural outgrowth of that urban-sophisticate comedy, and with it came enormous, iconic success. But playing Carrie on the hit HBO show was her primary employment for a long time, and it's nice to see her freed from the couture straightjacket in I Don't Know How She Does It, ready and willing to muss her hair a little.
In fact, that's among her biggest requirements as Kate Reddy, the working mother at the center of the film: muss hair, rush around, handle shirt stains and messy purses with aplomb. Kate is an investment executive and breadwinner for her family of four. But her husband Richard (Greg Kinnear) is starting to pick up more work, too, and their lives have become an elaborate juggling act of conflicting responsibilities. When Kate's investment project attracts the attention of high-powered Jack Abelhammer (Pierce Brosnan), she must jet back and forth between home in Boston and Abelhammer in New York with even greater frequency, prompting well-worn questions about whether modern women can have it all: family, relationship, and career.
I Don't Know How She Does It attempts to wring knowing laughs out of this dilemma, and Parker is certainly game; for once, the successful-woman slapstick feels motivated, not like a cutesy character tic. But there isn't much to Kate beyond her circumstances; Parker has bubbly charm, but here she's more example than fully rounded human. A performer -- or, perhaps more to the point, a writer -- like Tina Fey would give this material specific personality, not just relatable harriedness.
Instead, the movie relies on screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, adapting a novel by Allison Pearson. McKenna is an expert on the topic of having it all while living in half-fantasyland, having written 27 Dresses, The Devil Wears Prada, and Morning Glory, all, to some degree, about women who want happy relationships, but also love their jobs. We know this because they all talk about how much they love their jobs -- especially Kate Reddy, who may be protesting too much, in keeping with the movie's tell-and-show-and-tell approach.
The movie begins with vague overtures toward class-consciousness; Kate and Richard both need to work, it's implied, because they don't have as much money as other families at their daughter's school, who can afford stay-at-home status for their mothers (cartoonishly personified by Busy Phillips). But as the story goes on, it becomes clear that Kate's job is not a low-wage passion project, and her problems start to seem more philosophical than practical. The movie, insisting on some degree of wish-fulfillment even when showing unfulfilled wishes, can't allow Kate or Richard to work because they just plain need the money; they must both love their jobs, even when the screenplay can't quite come up with any examples of what they actually love about them.
Instead, it resorts to working-mom talking points, sometimes delivered directly to the camera. In a mockumentary touch, the movie cuts to talking-head interviews with its supporting characters: about Kate, about the modern workplace, about anything you may have missed in the frequent spats between Kate and Richard. Christina Hendricks, as Kate's best friend Allison, bears the brunt of this awkwardness
It's possible that director Douglas McGrath thinks of these fourth-wall asides, plus Kate's Sex and the City-ish narration, plus some onscreen scribbling to represent her many to-do lists, as playfully sophisticated, like Annie Hall-era Woody Allen (he collaborated with Allen on the script for Bullets Over Broadway). But absent real wit -- McKenna has a tendency to write movies that simultaneously require and desperately lack sparkling repartee -- it comes across more like one of those busy, candy-colored kids' movies rearranged for equally ADD parents, Lizzie McGuire grown up.
As such, many of the movie's scenes are truncated, sometimes repetitive vignettes; the material is just as hurried as Kate, only it's juggling the same few issues rather than an entire life. Jokes do land here and there, mostly relying on the performers. Olivia Munn, one of the least experienced in a cast full of smooth television professionals (also including Kelsey Grammer, Jane Curtin, and Seth Meyers), gets the movie's biggest laughs as Momo, Parker's junior charge, who wears a permanent tiny frown, alternating between displeasure and discomfort. It's a fresh angle on a mentor-protégé relationship; Momo looks on disapprovingly at her boss's thrown-together outfits and, yes, mussed hair, and Kate shakes it right off.
It's too bad that more of I Don't Know How She Does It doesn't follow that offbeat rhythm into an exploration of characters, rather than types and issues. It's not spectacularly unfunny or appallingly made; it's just a rote treatment of a familiar subject. But like Kate at her finance firm, the filmmakers seem convinced that they're making a difference, unaware that it's just a job.
