A rom-com in the same mold as Brooks’ earlier Broadcast News, but without the depth.
Reese Witherspoon has just lost her job as an Olympic softball champ and is looking for a new direction, along comes Paul Rudd, a businessman being indicted, and Owen Wilson, a vapid jock, as two possible matches. Witherspoon starts with Wilson, and while Wilson is full of charm, he’s also a bit of a dick, but since he’s narcisistic he’s not going to ask Witherspoon about her troubles, which is a win for her. Rudd, on the other hand, is the nice guy who falls for Witherspoon’s easy going small town wisdom, and listens to her, makes her feel loved, but he’s a little too goofy and strange for Witherspoon’s taste, plus there’s the whole business of possibly losing everything he has in an upcoming court case.
Broadcast News gave Holly Hunter two matches, a smart guy and a pretty one, which kept the viewer guessing until the last moment about who she’d go for. How Do You Know follows the same kind of guidelines, but now it’s a nice guy who might end up poor, and a rich, talented dick, so it’s a little more obvious how things will turn out.
It does have some charm, for example, it’s one of the few films I’ve seen recently where the girl doesn’t fall over at some point to underline how cute she is, and the nice guy is shown to have faults, making the final scene something of a real choice, even if it’s an obvious one. The script isn’t too bad and has a very charming central scene between Kathyrn Hahn, playing Rudd’s pregnant friend, and her boyfriend. Plus, the scenes between Witherspoon and Wilson strike me as more true than their counterparts in other films; yes, women will fall for men just because they’re pretty and self-confident, even if they’re clearly also hugely self-involved and not that nice.
However, there’s also some bland acting, Rudd, Wilson and Witherspoon are all playing to type, while Kathryn Hahn overacts in every scene. Rudd is a nice guy, but it’s obvious that Witherspoon could do better, whereas it’s not clear why Wilson, as a millionaire ballplayer, wouldn’t have a more, for example, storage space in his home, something which causes friction between the couples. Finally, it is hard to feel sympathy for what one can see are three incredibly successful people, even if two of the three are falling on hard times; having to downgrade your apartment to one the size most viewers already live in is not such a bad thing…
Overall, I’d say it’s a three star rom-com. Not quite the waste of time that most of these things are, but without enough depth to the love triangle, or to the characters own lives, to make it really worth recommending.
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