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Stressed out perfect mom
By Christy Lemire |
September 25, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WHEN you're a wife and working mother, there's this inescapable, self-imposed pressure to do everything right all the time. The idea of having it all - a great job and a loving family, a toned body and a sane mind - is as appealing as it is elusive.
You're constantly letting someone down sometime, which leads to guilt, which leads to more stress - which leads to even more sleepless nights, which doesn't help anybody.
"I Don't Know How She Does It," based on the best-selling novel of the same name, gets that dynamic, that incessant juggling act, and the ways in which we self-flagellate in trying to perfect it. This is not exactly a new concept but it's increasingly prevalent and complications are greater than ever. Director Douglas McGrath finds just the right tone. Sometimes.
Too often, though, he smothers those nuggets of insight with a jaunty, sitcommy tone, with gags telegraphed from a mile away and music that works too hard to cue our emotions.
It doesn't help that Sarah Jessica Parker, as the film's star, chimes in early and often with voice overs that sound exactly like the kinds of observations she used to make as Carrie on "Sex and the City," the role with which she will be eternally, intrinsically tied. "I Don't Know How She Does It" suggests what might have happened to Carrie if she had two kids with Mr Big to worry about, and less time to obsess over her wardrobe.
Here, as Kate Reddy, she's usually a mess: shirt partially untucked, hair uncombed, a splotch of that morning's breakfast lodged in a crusty clump on her blazer. Kate is an investment manager at the Boston office of a big New York financial firm, which already takes her away too often from her husband (Greg Kinnear), their 6-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son. But when she pitches an ambitious project to the firm's head honcho (Pierce Brosnan), just as her husband gets a new gig, they both find themselves even more crazed.
Parker has always been game for physical comedy and she gets plenty of opportunities to show off those veteran skills here, but she's also maintained a girlish vulnerability - that petite body, that tiny voice - that endears her even further.
You're constantly letting someone down sometime, which leads to guilt, which leads to more stress - which leads to even more sleepless nights, which doesn't help anybody.
"I Don't Know How She Does It," based on the best-selling novel of the same name, gets that dynamic, that incessant juggling act, and the ways in which we self-flagellate in trying to perfect it. This is not exactly a new concept but it's increasingly prevalent and complications are greater than ever. Director Douglas McGrath finds just the right tone. Sometimes.
Too often, though, he smothers those nuggets of insight with a jaunty, sitcommy tone, with gags telegraphed from a mile away and music that works too hard to cue our emotions.
It doesn't help that Sarah Jessica Parker, as the film's star, chimes in early and often with voice overs that sound exactly like the kinds of observations she used to make as Carrie on "Sex and the City," the role with which she will be eternally, intrinsically tied. "I Don't Know How She Does It" suggests what might have happened to Carrie if she had two kids with Mr Big to worry about, and less time to obsess over her wardrobe.
Here, as Kate Reddy, she's usually a mess: shirt partially untucked, hair uncombed, a splotch of that morning's breakfast lodged in a crusty clump on her blazer. Kate is an investment manager at the Boston office of a big New York financial firm, which already takes her away too often from her husband (Greg Kinnear), their 6-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son. But when she pitches an ambitious project to the firm's head honcho (Pierce Brosnan), just as her husband gets a new gig, they both find themselves even more crazed.
Parker has always been game for physical comedy and she gets plenty of opportunities to show off those veteran skills here, but she's also maintained a girlish vulnerability - that petite body, that tiny voice - that endears her even further.
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