Life As We Know It
2 1/2 stars (out of 4)
Rated: PG
Life As We Know It comes with more qualifiers than a used car.
It begins with implausibility and then tragedy before lurching towards romantic comedy. And the two main characters, played by Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel, are harder to warm up to than a cold bed.
The story is highly predictable — when it’s not being downright absurd — and also shamelessly manipulative. It combines the accidental parenthood of Knocked Up with the romantic triangle and baked goods of It’s Complicated, without improving on either of those movies.
But just like the clunker you end up buying and liking in spite of everything, Life As We Know It gets you there. Exactly where is hard to say, but chances are you won’t regret making the journey.
It has some distance to travel right at the start, by immediately establishing Duhamel’s Eric Messer (everybody calls him Messer) as the blind date from hell. He shows up at the Atlanta abode of Holly Berenson (Heigl) an hour late, dressed like a slob and shrugging off his failure to make a restaurant reservation. He then proceeds to take a booty call from another girl, making little attempt to disguise what he’s doing.
The justifiably outraged Holly calls him a word that rhymes with “gas hole” and swears never again to let her best friends Alison and Peter (Christina Hendricks and Hayes MacArthur) set her up on a date.
Can this relationship be saved? Why would anyone care?
And that would seem to be that. But it turns out that Messer is also best buds with Alison and Peter. He and Holly are obliged to be civil towards each other when they meet for occasions such as the birthday of Sophie, their friends’ bouncing baby daughter.
The forced civility becomes serious when fate conspires to make Holly and Messer the guardians of Sophie, with the further proviso that they must live under the same roof. This latter requirement may be the toughest thing of all because Holly is tightly wound and Messer really is a selfish rhymes-with-gas-hole.
Are you buying this so far? It’s impossible to fathom a couple choosing two single people who hate each other as child guardians, and doing so without consulting with them first.
And neither Holly, a baker and aspiring restaurateur, nor Messer, a TV director for the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, has shown the slightest interest in parenthood. (It’s a situation Heigl would certainly recall from Knocked Up, when she played a TV professional suddenly made pregnant by a lout.)
So imagine the surprise of Holly and Messer when they are confronted with a squawling infant, explosively soiled diapers, babysitting emergencies and Fisher-Price toys strewn dangerously around the house.
Of such ideas are so-so sitcoms made, but then director Greg Berlanti comes by it honestly, having arrived here by way of the tube.
He and screenwriters Ian Deitchman and Kristin Rusk Robinson mine every last nugget of the motherlode (and fatherlode) of new-parent traumas, which are often funny even if completely unoriginal.
Minor twists ensue when Josh Lucas enters the picture to provide romantic distraction for Heigl, reminding us all too clearly of the recent romcom hit It’s Complicated, which starred Meryl Streep as a baker mom with one too many suitors. Lucas actually says, “It’s complicated,” at one point, and Life has the brass to steal that film’s funniest scene, where a couple gets stoned and silly.
About the only thing that Life doesn’t rip from another film is the busybody social worker character played by Sarah Burns, who is constantly making surprise visits to Holly and Messer to assess their suitability as parents.
She may be the only person in doubt as to how this arrangement is going to end up, although it takes nearly two hours to do so, about 20 minutes too long.
Still, Heigl and Duhamel wear well. They’re not exactly Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, but neither are they chopped liver. As accidental parents go, they go pretty well together, making this Life worth knowing, at least until the next diaper change.
Peter Howell is a syndicated movie critic for The Toronto Star.