DVD: How Do You Know Deserves a Second Chance

Critics generally ganged up James L. Brooks' How Do You Know (out this week on DVD and Blu-Ray from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) when it opened over the holidays -- but whether it's the sort of movie that plays better on the small screen or if I'm just a sucker for Brooks' brand of neurotic romance, I found myself quite charmed by this box-office dud. You might consider giving it a whirl on your home system.

Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd star as a couple meeting together at the low point in each of their lives -- she just got bumped from the US Olympic Softball team, and he's facing indictment over some financial malfeasance at the firm (founded by his father, played by Jack Nicholson) where he's CEO.

Witherspoon and Rudd have a colossally awkward first date, which becomes one of several scenes in which the characters force each other to stop talking, since they're only digging themselves deeper into a hole. (I was reminded of the museum sequence from Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle -- from equally dialogue-driven director Eric Rohmer -- in which the title characters challenge each other to go an entire afternoon without speaking.)

Also complicating the budding romantic relationship is Witherspoon's character's involvement with a dim playboy pro baseball player, played by Owen Wilson. He's the kind of guy who keeps an array of small and extra-small hoodies for his dates to wear home the next morning, and he constantly wants credit for acting like less of a douche than usual.

While the Witherspoon-Rudd-Wilson triangle won't necessarily make anyone forget about Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks, and William Hurt in Brooks' Broadcast News, they ping off each other charmingly, with some of Brooks' trademark sharp dialogue. (Witherspoon to a flirtatious Rudd: "I don't understand what you're doing -- these can not be moves." Angry Nicholson to Rudd: "You are a f**king moron!" [throws his hands up] "Too rough.") There's also a sequence involving a proposal and a video camera that's a comic gem, pivoting from sentimentality to belly laughs and back again.

Granted, I don't want to oversell the film, but while it may be damning with faint praise to call it Brooks' best work since Broadcast News, it definitely feels like a case of an auteur getting his groove back.