Tricky! The question posed — provocatively, without a question
mark — in the title of James L. Brooks’s How Do You Know,
is not answered anywhere in the movie except in the form of a
throwaway line, a dirty joke made by a character who doesn’t
otherwise appear. How can you tell when you’re in love? another
character asks — rather foolishly, it seems to me, since if you
can’t tell you’re not in love. But this nonce character answers:
“I’ll tell you how I can tell. I use a condom with all the other
girls.” The joke seems to be at the expense of the promiscuous
culture of the professional athlete, which is itself a running joke
in the movie, but it also shows an unlovely contempt for the
romantic conventions that it is otherwise seeking to exploit. It is
also a joke at the expense of the movie itself, which poses a far
more interesting question and then refuses to answer it.
We begin with two people who don’t know each other. Lisa
(Reese Witherspoon) is an Olympic women’s softball player who, as
we know but she doesn’t, is about to be cut from the U.S. team.
George (Paul Rudd) is about to open a letter from the U.S.
Department of Justice informing him that he is the subject of a
federal investigation. While life was still good for both of them,
somebody had suggested that these two should go on a blind date.
George, showing what a nice guy he is, telephones Lisa to tell her
that he is already in a relationship and so can’t make it. Lisa is
also dating a pitcher for the Washington Nationals named Matty
(Owen Wilson) whose idea of post-coital charm after their first,
casual encounter is to say to her: “Female jocks are amazing!” —
and then, by offering her a sweatshirt from a large store of them
he keeps for such occasions, shows how he knows whereof he
speaks.
This is not (quite) enough to put Lisa off — which is
more amazing even than female jocks — but she does consider
herself at liberty to accept a subsequent proposal for a dinner
date when George’s girlfriend, on the news of his looming
indictment, dumps him by saying that “we are not well-matched for
this interval in your life.” The two go on their date but, as it is
overshadowed by George’s personal misfortune, no sparks fly.
Instead, Lisa, prior to the receipt of her own bad news, cheers
George up by proposing that they dine in silence. This is not the
only puzzling thing about this movie. Why should not-talking have a
therapeutic effect? Of course, we know from the beginning that
these two are destined to be together, so pretty much everything
has a therapeutic effect. As a result, too, when they do begin
talking, they are like monkeys picking lice off each other, as
their courtship consists of mutual therapeutic grooming. Sample:
“Deny a voice to the thing that’s feeling upset.”
Yeah, that will work.
Since the question of “how do you know” is of no real
interest to anyone except (briefly) Matty, the film instead turns
on that more interesting question I mentioned earlier. It is this.
Should nice-guy George go to jail for his business tycoon dad (Jack
Nicholson), the kind of guy who, if there is any such kind of guy,
says that “cynicism is sanity”? If he doesn’t, dad himself will
himself go to jail for life. For, not surprisingly, George is
completely innocent of any wrong-doing, but his dad is not. He,
George, can save him by taking the blame for the company’s bribing
of Middle East middle-men. Do people really go to jail for that,
let alone for life? Perhaps they do. But that a father would ask
his only son to spend three years in the slammer to save his own
skin, or actually connive to bring it about, is not the least of
the film’s implausibilities. I think you’re supposed to laugh when
dad compares his anguish on asking his son to go to jail for him
with “the side effects I got from Lipitor,” but instead you just
wonder at the kind of person who could think that funny.
It’s just one of several things about this movie that are
a bit off, as the British would say, and that are constantly
pulling against its attempts at humor — which, apart from a few
one-liners, are mostly pretty feeble anyway. Also, though I like
Paul Rudd and am sure he is as nice a guy as George himself, he’s
simply not leading man material. I’ve never been that enamored of
Reese Witherspoon since Election either, and both the Owen
Wilson and Jack Nicholson characters tip over, as Owen Wilson and
Jack Nicholson characters so often do, into caricature. The
seriousness of the moral dilemma in which George finds himself
sorts ill with both the attempted comedy and his lightweight
persona on the screen, and the way in which Mr. Brooks contrives to
get him out of it simply dodges the problem anyway without
requiring him to take any kind of moral stand. George’s last
inspirational thought to Lisa is that “we are all just one small
adjustment away from making our lives work.” I don’t think that can
be true of our lives, but it’s certainly not true of Mr. Brooks’s
movie.
