Life As We Know It (2010)

Life As We Know It arrived in 2010 with a premise engineered for tears and a title engineered for nothing at all. Holly, a caterer, and Messer, a sports director, despise each other until their best friends die in a car crash and leave them a baby. That is the entire architecture of the thing. What follows is a sequence of domestic negotiations about cribs, day care, and a bakery expansion, conducted in the affluent Buckhead district of Atlanta by people who own their homes and worry about money in a decorative way.

The film's cultural ledger is remarkably clean. Its cast is white, uniformly and without apology. No gay friends appear to offer a wry aside. Race never enters the frame, not as conflict, not as texture. The environment is weather. Capitalism is a mild inconvenience, resolved when Messer invests in Holly's business. Holly has a career and a libido, and the screenplay treats both as furniture, not as argument. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns anything about society. The only lesson is that a baby says "Mama" at the correct emotional moment.

There is something almost restful about a picture this unburdened by the anxieties of the present decade. It wants nothing from us except a mild cry and a ticket stub. Critics were unimpressed, audiences handed it an A minus, and the box office returned $106 million against a $38 million budget. The film is a time capsule from a commercial order that no longer exists, preserved in amber, asking no questions and answering none.