One of the quirks of Lisa Jorgenson (Reese Witherspoon) in James L. Brooks’ 2010 film How Do You Know is a tendency to speak in pre-packaged pearls of wisdom, where one gets the impression that the structural integrity of her interior life is a neurotic composition of self-help sloganeering. In a contrived “first date” with George (Paul Rudd), we have, in less than two minutes: “well, the bad days make the good ones better” and “never drink to feel better, only drink to feel even better.” After an overnight tryst with Matty (Owen Wilson), a playboy pitcher for the Washington Nationals, she storms out the next morning, only to come back to his apartment, apologize for being offended by his crass morning-after behavior, and explain to the puzzled Matty: “Don’t judge anybody else until you check yourself out, that way you’re lucky if it’s your fault because you can correct the situation.” The 31 year-old Lisa has just been cut from the U.S.A. softball team, a catastrophe for someone, we presume, who has spent her life as an athlete. After receiving the news on her laptop, she goes to the bathroom mirror, where we all weaken in the face of our capacity to inflict inner violence. Her face is only just visible as she tears up. The mirror is adorned all over with post-it notes, each inscribed with more motivational quotables, including, for those who keep a sharp eye out, her aforementioned line to Matty on three separate post-its.
Brooks deals in neurotics, and Witherspoon’s character here is of a tradition in his films where protagonists are afflicted with an identifying behavioral tic that reveals fault lines in their inner foundation: think Holly Hunter’s daily breakdowns in Broadcast News (1987) or Jack Nicholson’s compulsion to sit in the same seat at the same restaurant, with plastic cutlery, and be served by the same waitress, in As Good As It Gets (1997). Brooks’ major recurring theme, the convergences between one’s emotional and professional failures, gives rise to How Do You Know’s own flavor of neuroses, amidst a plot remarkable for how meandering, irreverent, and ultimately banal its narrative “events” are. We never really get the impression that Lisa is as upset about being cut as her teammates and coach want her to be, and while it is slightly odd to see someone with such a composed exterior make rash decisions, like moving in with Matty after one date, the stakes of her crisis are ultimately existential, and stuck at a bare simmer. Her task in the film is to choose her suitable romantic partner between George and Matty, but Rudd and Wilson’s characters as drawn never make it an actual choice. Wilson plays Matty as a moron, endearingly so, but one allergic to commitment and incapable of serious thought, and it’s never clear if Lisa even respects him in the first place. The obvious choice is George, the only obstacle being an impending jail sentence due to some ill-defined bribery scandal, set up to take the fall for his father (Jack Nicholson), the owner of the family business (again, unclear as to what this business is). Rudd’s George has clearly never had an actual problem in his life before, and the investigation and betrayal by his father cause him to self-dramatize a breakdown he can’t really commit to, leading to broad, comedic scenes of drunkenness and self-pitying, including a great bit where he physically runs away from his father when confronted with the problem.
Deep down, George knows that at worst, he is to receive the lightest of jail sentences possible, and so again, the film purposefully deflates its own stakes. This was a problem for critics at the time — the film currently sits at 31% on the RT Tomatometer™ — with Roger Ebert put off by its characters’ “sitcom problems” and Manohla Dargis of the New York Times decrying its “disconnect from anything that feels like real life.” Perceptive enough insights, but these critics fail to realize that these qualities are integral to the film’s virtues. Brooks’ critical successes, Terms of Endearment (1983), Broadcast News, and As Good As It Gets, all have a pristine neatness about them, a smooth, televisual finesse, complete with puzzle pieces that fit perfectly, and a balance of elements that never threaten to tip over. Sometimes things can be too brilliant, as such clean designs make one overly wary of the techniques of manipulation, such as Brooks’ use of children in each film, or his pummeling, emotional music cues. Brooks and his comedic melodramas know exactly how to get the best out of one another; these films proceed confidently, and land their respective planes without a scratch. His box office failures, I’ll Do Anything (1994), 2004’s Spanglish, and How Do You Know have a separate quality: they are often rather awkward, an anxious clunkiness hanging over the proceedings. This latter group of films seem less aware of their faults than the successes are aware of their brilliance, but Brooks is far more interesting when these cracks appear. The Brooksian world teems with people self-absorbed to an absurd extent, characters in swirling states of inner vexation, and the lack of finesse present in his “failures” is more befitting of the peculiar personalities he wishes to film. It’s like listening to someone nervously ramble and reveal things about themselves they don’t realize. The effect is utterly disarming, but drop your defenses as a viewer and all of the sudden the aphoristic conclusions of his cinema strike like a guided missile, and appear to contain universal, vitiating truth.
How Do You Know’s protagonists all have things to learn, and, crucially, this knowledge must come from within themselves, as they all have major issues listening to what other people tell them. Lisa and George flirt as if they are babbling to a therapist, speaking past one another, externalizing internal monologues. They are mutually unaware of the specifics of each other’s crises and as a result don’t recognize the random set of circumstances that brought them together in the first place. The film suggests that their lack of awareness is in large part responsible for the final realization that they are right for each other. The scenes in which Lisa takes refuge from Matty in George’s apartment have the quality of the ending to Much Ado About Nothing, where Beatrice and Benedick attempt to explain their lack of feelings for one another, while holding sonnets professing their love behind their backs. The inevitability of it all shifts from being screenwriting contrivance to a world romantically designed to accommodate feelings we don’t know we have, or desperately wish we did. Brooks’ aphoristic quality emerges: we are often our own biggest obstacles in our pursuit of happiness; or, as George puts it, when he finally confesses his love to Lisa after a truly ridiculous attempted fable about the invention of Play-Doh, “We’re all just one small adjustment from making our lives work.”
Is this realistic? Probably not, but the film, and Brooks’ filmography in general, is deeply suspicious of realism’s privileged position as the more serious of cinema’s modes of representation. A favorite detail from the film: almost every street in the film’s various exteriors has undergone a “wet-down” in spite of the fact that we never see it rain. In the aforementioned scene where George runs away from his father, the intersection is even visible where the production crew stopped hosing down the street. On the one hand, this can make one feel silly defending a film such as this, which is ostensibly routine, generic, and where its effects appear to be reliant on being caught off-guard. But it’s worth contemplating whether to be unexpectedly struck dumb in the face a film’s emotional currents is as critically valid of a response as a more analytic recognition of symbolic weight or thematic density. Brooks is a throwback in this regard, even outdated in his commitments, with a filmography both titanically successful and half-full of failures. A belief in cliché can be as artistically risky as any of cinema’s other available provocations. Maybe it’s better put this way: is there another film with a budget of $120 million where not a single cent is visible on screen? What a precious gift.
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