Running after kids while in Jimmy Choos? Pancake batter on a Prada jacket? The lines between Carrie Bradshaw and Sarah Jessica Parker blur in the new movie, I Don't Know How She Does It, which opens today and is based on a British novel about a working mother who tries to do it all/have it all and not go insane. Oh, and in the movie, Parker's character Kate Reddy is married to Greg Kinnear (Aidan?, flirts with Pierce Brosnan (Mr. Big?), is best friends with Christina Hendricks (Miranda/Samantha/Charlotte?), has a work rival in Seth Meyers (someone mean, like Michiko Kakutani, maybe?).
Female critics are mostly down on the adaptation directed by Douglas McGrath. (Okay, the men are too—it's 19% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.) Slate's Dana Stevens says, "Like Carrie Bradshaw, Parker's dithering Sex and the City protagonist, Kate has a way of taking up all the air in the room and getting applauded for it. Seriously, has it occurred to this woman that she's losing credibility at work not because she's a mother but because she's a chronic over-apologizer with a persecution complex?" Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum calls it a "bogus chick flick," grades it a D+ and adds, an "insurmountable problem is the difference between Parker's performance as a fortysomething banker, wife, and mother musing (in voice-over) at her computer and her previous performance as a single, thirtysomething girl-about-town in Sex and the City: There is none. I don't know why she does."
Melissa Anderson opines in the Village Voice, "[The main character] is strong, she is invincible, she has the same surname as the singer who made 'I Am Woman' a hit. She is also played by Sarah Jessica Parker, a performer so aggressively determined to make us like her that no work-life conflicts in the film ever gain any traction; we're too distracted by the actress's manic tics (the head tilts, the popping of the wounded-deer eyes) to" notice any real adversity." The Daily News' Elizabeth Weitzman actually kinda liked it, "Unfortunately, Parker infuses Kate - a nonstop mess who's constantly apologizing - with such frantic insecurity that she comes across more as an anxious twentysomething than a 40-year-old mother. It's Hendricks who provides the welcome maturity, and I couldn't help wishing she had been given the lead."
