Fine Performances, Muddled Film

It’s a clichéd, tiresome vehicle, nonetheless,“I Don’t Know How She Does It” allows Sarah Jessica Parker to parade her singular energetic dizziness. Occasionally charming, frequently tedious and mostly meaningless, the movie tries hard to reproduce Allison Pearson’s gangbuster chick-lit novel of 2002, a sporadically trenchant look at the life of Kate Eddy, a London investment manager. Pearson’s book started its best-selling life in a newspaper column, as did “Sex and the City.” Kate of the column related amusing, even hilarious moments and days in her multi-tasking life as wife, mother and executive, delivering acerbic observations on her bosses and working equals (all men) and admitting her guilt over time away from family. In trying to re-create the intimate and confessional nature of the book, writer Aline Bros McKenna has used the tired convention of voice-over for Kate and look-at-the-camera talking heads for her female assistant, her best friend and for the stay-at-home mom who is her main antagonist. Oddly, only one tepidly underhanded male colleague, played by Seth Meyers, gets to speak on behalf of men. What is most alarming becomes obvious minutes into the movie: Kate is a mess. Rushing from her Boston kitchen to children’s school to office to airport to meetings in New York or Chicago or wherever,she is frazzled and often just shy of disheveled. The book’s Kate is very good at her job; this Kate wouldn’t last a day in the higher echelons of investment banking nor, probably, in the junior ranks either. And it’s not that Kate isn’t well-off and well- helped. She lives in an enormous apartment large enough to house several school classes, has an efficient, if willful nanny and is married to a husband (the charming and patient Greg Kinnear) who almost always seems to be home. Her assistant at work, the Harvard summa cum laude Momu (a standout Olivia Munn) is compulsively, if humorlessly, efficient. What keeps you from walking out of the theater 30 minutes into the film are the performances. Even dunked in this mess, Parker is charming — one forgets what a good actress she can be — and winning. Kinnear, given little to do and some truly banal lines, is the essence of patience and husbandly support. Busy Philipps plays Wendy, the “Housewives of Boston” stay-at-home mom, a woman who spends five hours a day in her gym (she only talks to the camera while walking a treadmill), and Jane Curtin contributes her acerbic delivery as Kate’s mother-in-law who thinks mothers should stay home. Best, perhaps, is Pierce Brosnan as Jack Abelhammer, the suave, widowed senior executive in Kate’s New York office who champions her investment idea and, oh, why bother, you know he falls for her. Brosnan reminds you about what calm, assured acting and timing can bring to even ridiculously simple-minded situations and lines. Director Douglas McGrath (“Emma” and “Infamous”) delivers a good-looking, brisk film with odd inconsistencies. His camera follows Kate through Boston’s financial district and across expanses of the Boston Common to be sure. But her house and street were clearly filmed in New York City; there is even an embarrassing moment when the camera pulls backward on her street revealing car after car with New York license plates. The movie has lots of momentum but no tension. You know what is going to happen from the get-go. Characters don’t develop, they just exist. And the ending is saccharine and sentimental, like the too-sweet candy that falls out of a pinata earlier. Surely working mothers deserve better than this. “I Don’t Know How She Does It” is showing in Millerton, Great Barrington and Torrington. The film is rated PG-13.