Life as We Know It (Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I screened Charles a movie from the DVD backlog that turned out to be quite interesting even if rather predictable: Life as We Know It, directed by Greg Berlanti (who’s since become known primarily as a producer of superhero TV shows featuring the DC characters for the CW Network) from a script by Ian Deitchman and Kristin Rusk Robinson. Released in 2010 and shot entirely in Georgia to take advantage of the Peachtree State’s famously generous subsidies to filmmakers -- though at least this time Atlanta, Georgia is playing itself instead of being passed off as somewhere else -- Life as We Know It begins with an inauspicious blind date between Holly Berenson (Katherine Heigl) and Eric Messer (Josh Duhamel).Eric -- who usually goes by his last name (people often call out to him, “Hey, Messer”) -- shows up for the date on a motorcycle and hasn’t made reservations at a restaurant for dinner. He’s also kept Holly waiting for an hour, and when he makes a crude and blatant pass at her she sends him away.

This disastrous date was set up by both people’s best friends, married couple Peter (Hayes McArthur) and Allison (Christina Hendricks) Novak, whom we next see at an elaborate one-year birthday party for the Novaks’ daughter Sophie (credited to three people -- Alexis, Brynn and Brooke Clagett -- were the shooting schedule and the legal limits on how long a baby could work so stringent that instead of the common casting trick of using twins, they had to use triplets?). Holly, who makes her living as the owner of a combination high-end bakery and deli she’s hoping to expand into a full-service restaurant (a plot line that seems hopelessly dated in the SARS-CoV-2 era!), has supplied a magnificent spread of cakes and pastries that seems more suited to a Marie Antoinette “do” at the Palace of Versailles than a birthday party for a one-year-old who can’t eat most of the stuff and would probably be too young to remember much of it anyway.

Then Peter and Allison both get killed in an auto accident, and under the terms of their will Holly and Eric are supposed to raise Sophie jointly and live in the Novaks’ home. They left enough of a trust to pay the mortgage on the place but not any of the other expenses, and of course the other expenses pile up and add fuel to the already combustible relationship between the two leads, who are supposed to raise a child together even though they can’t stand each other and, being single, are more interested in dating other people than establishing a modus vivendi with each other. In addition to the usual gags of a baby-raising movie -- the constant crying and demands for attention that keep the adults from getting any sleep; the feedings (or attempts to feed, since Sophie spits up so much of her food Holly rather grimly jokes, “She’s the only person in Atlanta who doesn’t like my cooking”), and the need for constant diaper changes and other untimely poops (at one point the two are bathing Sophie when her bowels let loose, and the only thing Holly has to catch baby’s latest shit in is Eric’s prized baseball cap which he’s had since high school), there are also the periodic and predictably ill-timed viusits from Janne Groff (Sarah Burns), a social worker assigned by the county to make sure Holly and Eric are parenting properly.

On one such occasion Janine shows up just as Holly and Eric have made marijuana-laced brownies and made love for the first time (well, it is a 21st-century romantic comedy, after al, and though Berlanti is reticent enough he shows a good deal less than most of the Lifetime directors do in their soft-core porn scenes, we still get the idea. Janine grabs for one of the spiked brownies and Holly knocks it out of her hand, saying it was a bad batch and she’s too proud of her skills as a baker to let a guest have one. Then the writers throw a curveball: Eric, who’s been working as a technical director at Atlanta Hawks basketball telecasts (and who would watch the games on TV when the team was on the road … until Sophie insisted on watching a kids’ show called The Wiggles instead, the kind of stupefyingly banal show I couldn’t stand even when I was a kid!), gets an offer to become a full TV sports director. Unfortunately, it’s in Phoenix (though all we see of Phoenix is a couple of second-unit backgrounds as Eric drives in front of a green screen), and Eric takes the job and leaves Holly to fend for Sophie alone. In the end, though, everything works out and he returns, taking his place in the family again after a bizarre scene in which Janine ends up on the side of good, helping Holly race to the airport to catch Eric before he takes his return flight to Phoenix … only Eric himself decided not to leave and is back at the house when Holly and Janine return.

I was a bit disappointed by the ending -- it’s a pet peeve of mine when a movie script makes a character choose between his lover and his dream job, and I’d have rather seen it end with Eric and Holly selling the house, Holly selling her bakery and using the proceeds to start a new one in Phoenix, and Eric keeping his unlikely girlfriend, his even more unlikely daughter and his dream job. But Life as We Know It is still a quite pleasant and entertaining movie (even though with my antiquarian bent I couldn’t help but think how much better the basic concept could have been done in the 1930’s or 1940’s with Barbara Stanwyck and Cary Grant! Indeed, Charles noted similarities between this and the 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut, in which Stanwyck and her leading man, Dennis Morgan, had to pose as a couple for a feature in the magazine Stanwyck worked for). It’s well directed, nicely if rather predictably written, and Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel are good in the leads even though one gets the impression that in 2010 they were the people producers called if they couldn’t get Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise. (Interestingly, Charles thought the other man in Holly’s life -- Josh Lucas as Sam, who cruised Holly at her shop early in the movie and later turned out to be Sophie’s pediatrician -- was sexier than Josh Duhamel, though I thought he looked too bland and boring, like the tall, lanky, sandy-haired actors who get cast as good husbands in Lifetime movies.)

I also liked the young Melissa McCarthy as DeeDee, hanger-on in the Novaks’ social circle, though I wondered why in this Georgia-set film she’s the only character who speaks with a Southern accent. (Maybe the tales I keep hearing from Democratic political commentators that enough Northerners are moving to the South they’re diluting the area’s traditional racial prejudices and making it more socially, as well as politically, liberal.) Life as We Know It is one of those pleasant little movies that doesn’t achieve greatness but doesn’t really aspire to it either -- it’s pleasant entertainment that exploits some of moviedom’s hoariest cliches but still puts enough fresh spins on them one is with the writers instead of leaping ahead of them and thinking, “Oh, I know where this is going to go.”