Film Review: Life As We Know It -- or Don't

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 29 September 2010 09:57

Written by Lloyd Carroll

Life As We Know It
Directed by Greg Berlanti
Starring Katherine Heigl, Josh Duhamel  
Warner Brothers Pictures, the distributor of Life As We Know It, held a press conference in New York with the cast two weeks before the film opened in theaters. I asked the panelists if this was basically a Lifetime TV movie that was designed for theatrical release. Katherine Heigl took umbrage with my question as she snapped, “Are you calling this a TV movie!”

Yes, Katherine, I am. In addition to being this film’s star, Heigl is also its executive producer so it is easy to understand her defensiveness.
           
Director Greg Berlanti, to his credit did acknowledge the point that I was making but defended the film by saying that studio executives want to see certain plot devices, a cinematic equivalent for comfort food. Berlanti has a long and successful history as a director and producer of television sitcoms.

Holly Berenson (Katherine Heigl) and Eric Messer (Josh Duhamel) were set up on a blind date that quickly became a disaster by married couple Peter and Alison Novack (Hayes MacArthur and Christina Hendricks) with whom they are both extremely close. In the three years since that hellish date, they have had to tolerate each other at common social events such as when the Novack's daughter, Sophie, was born.
       
Holly has a successful bake shop in Buckhead, a ritzy Atlanta suburb, and would like to add on a restaurant. While her professional life is successful, her social life isn’t. (Yes, Heigl is cast in another prototypical yet improbable someone-who-can-never-have-it-all yuppie role.)

Eric “Mess” Messer is a television sports director who has no trouble attracting the ladies and loves his unattached life. While he is a fun-loving free spirit, the career-obsessed Holly is overly analytical.
      
Their lives change dramatically when tragedy ensues -- Peter and Alison are killed in a car crash on a rainy night in Georgia. Luckily, Sophie was home with her babysitter. Holly and Eric quickly learn from the Novack's attorney that they were named Sophie's godparents of and it was the late couple’s wish that the two raise Sophie in the case of such a tragedy.
      
Obviously, neither Holly nor Eric are prepared for parenthood but when they learn that Sophie will wind up being a ward of child services, they decide to give it a go and raise her by themselves while trying to lead separate lives. They move into their friends’ old home figuring that would be best for Sophie.
       
In realizing that he is not working with the cheeriest script, Berlanti tries his best to inject in some levity.

He has a great supporting cast who play Holly and Eric’s neighbors that includes comedic improv stars Will Sasso, Andrew Daly and Melissa McCarthy (the co-star of CBS’s new Monday evening comedy, Mike & Molly).

However it's the predictable array of baby poop, baby vomit, baby spitting food jokes that have been done to death that act as ballast to sink this film. I am not nostalgic for a revival of the Three Men And A Baby or the Look Who’s Talking franchises.
    
Even more egregiously, “Life As We Know It” follows every relationship cliche imaginable. The duo initially loathe one another but anyone over the age of three know how things wind up even when Holly gets involved with a seemingly perfect man, pediatrician Dr. Sam (Josh Lucas in a thankless nice-guy role), and Eric leaves for Phoenix to take a directing job with NBA team, the Suns.
           
Life As We Know It thankfully is unlike anyone’s life that I know.                        

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