How Do You Know (2010)

How Do You Know arrived in December of 2010 with a hundred and twenty million dollars of studio money behind it and the quiet confidence of a director who had, at one time, been James L. Brooks. What he built was a love triangle among affluent white people in Philadelphia, played by Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, and Jack Nicholson, the last of whom would shortly retire from the business, presumably to avoid further assignments of this kind. The film grossed forty-eight million dollars and was later listed among the great box office failures of its era. The Los Angeles Times keeps such a list. Somebody has to.

The protagonist is a professional softball player, which the production notes treat as an act of daring. She is cut from the national team and spends the remainder of the running time deciding between two men. No argument is made about her, no critique is lodged on her behalf, and no larger point about women in sport is attempted. The corporate subplot concerns an executive wrongly accused of securities fraud, and the film's sympathies rest entirely with him, a wealthy man having a difficult quarter. Wealth is a setting here, not a subject.

There is nothing to lecture about, which is its own small mercy. No climate anxieties, no reckonings with race, no body image discourse, no neurodivergent coding, no historical revision, and no sermon of any kind, because the film has no thesis to preach. Critics at the time complained that it lacked even a point of view. That complaint stands. The picture is a long, soft, well-lit shrug, and we are left to classify it accordingly.