It’s sad to report that James L. Brooks — who virtually invented the smart modern romantic dramedy with “Broadcast News” and “As Good as It Gets” when he wasn’t helping to midwife the TV landmarks “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Simpsons” — is responsible for a mess like “How Do You Know.”
Despite a blue-chip cast headed by Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd and Jack Nicholson, this rambling, overproduced, tone-deaf melange of romance, comedy and drama is only slightly more engaging than Brooks’ other feature this century, the unfortunate Adam Sandler vehicle “Spanglish” (2004).
Indeed, the four stars often seem to be acting in separate movies, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Witherspoon is the ostensible protagonist, a pro softball player named Lisa who is cut from the Olympic team just as she turns 31. Brooks’ script pretty much drops the ramifications of this, intermittently focusing instead on Lisa’s very casual relationship with Matty (Wilson), a Major League Baseball player who is very happily playing the field.
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She also becomes intermittently involved with a nebbishy business executive named George (Rudd), first seen being ushered out of his office because he’s the target of a stock-fraud investigation. Except for George, everyone in the movie, and probably in the audience, knows that George is being set up by his devious father (Nicholson).
The spectacularly clueless Matty, meanwhile, is asking a teammate, “How do you know you’re in love?” At the risk of giving away one of the very few funny lines in the movie, the reply is, “When I start wearing condoms with other women.”
So Matty, who thoughtfully stocks women’s clothes in various sizes for his one-night stands to wear the morning after, invites Lisa to move in with him.
Brooks’ dubious thesis is that a smart, independent woman like Lisa would be rendered so insecure by being fired that she would embrace a guy like Matty — whom she describes as “insensitive” — to avoid being with someone who might feel sorry for her. I’m not buying that — or the casting of Wilson as a lothario, which seems well out of his comfort zone as an actor.
Wilson may get second billing, but Witherspoon has so much more chemistry with Rudd that the final outcome is never really in doubt. The idea that Lisa would pick someone facing a stretch in jail over a boyfriend who makes $14 million a year may not pass a reality test, though.
The potentially more interesting part of “How Do You Know” is the relationship between George and his father. Playing against his man-boy persona, Rudd has never been better. Nicholson, unfortunately, has rarely been worse — he never finds his groove in an uncharacteristically low-energy performance.
Brooks seems to have lost his confidence as a filmmaker, chickening out well short of a Madoff-ian dark place. Instead, Rudd spends way too much time making puppy-dog eyes at Witherspoon.
“How Do You Know,” which almost perversely never shows its two athletes at work, is the product of an out-of-touch filmmaker that never really gets to second base.