Trailer For SJP's I Don't Know How She Does It Leaves Us Deeply Conflicted

By Dodai Stewart | May 27, 2011 | 6:00pm

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The movie I Don’t Know How She Does It, based on the bestselling novel by Allison Pearson, follows a woman dedicated to her work and devoted to her family. In the book, she is described as being a victim of “time famine” — “a woman who counts seconds like other women count calories.” There’s a meta feel to this trailer, since Sarah Jessica Parker is also a successful working mother, and if you squint, Greg Kinnear kind of looks like Matthew Broderick, and the son in the movie kinda looks like James Wilkie. The flick is supposedly a comedy, but watching other people get super stressed out just is rather anxiety-inducing, so you may not laugh. Oliver Lyttelton over at The Playlist has even more unkind things to say about the trailer, writing:

…This looks like reheated leftovers, like The Weinstein Company cut-and-pasted outtakes from “The Nanny Diaries,” “Serendipity” and “Confessions of A Shopaholic” into the outline for a new romantic comedy. It combines the why-should-I-give-a-shit-about-your-problems misjudgment of the loathsome “Sex and the City 2” with the deeply racist your-child-will-end-up-speaking-Portuguese-because-it-spends-all-its-time-with-the-nanny scaremongering of any number of similar films, creating some kind of bullshit lilywhite New York brownstone rom-com checklist full house, and we’d rather impale ourselves on the kind of immaculately-lit Christmas tree that crops up here than go within 100 miles of it.

Right. Okay.

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It’s no secret that women have to fight different battles than men in the workplace. A woman who runs late for a meeting may not want to admit it was because she had to drop her kid off at school, lest her employer view mommy duty as a negative or weakness. The balancing act of running a family and a career with equal intensity is one many women can relate to, and exposing just how tough it is — even with money and a nanny and a husband — can be interesting. However. Around the world, plenty of women manage to work and have children, often without nannies or husbands or six figure salaries, and this movie can come off as a strung-together list of First World Problems. Plus, if you’re the sort of person who believes that women should choose motherhood or a career, because women can’t have it all, and shouldn’t try, this clip could serve as the perfect propaganda piece.

If I sound conflicted, it’s because I am, and because when SJP breaks the fourth wall and addresses the camera just like she did in early seasons of Sex And The City, I got confused and unnerved. Trying to decide if having it all is awesome or awful gave me a headache.

Watch: Sarah Jessica Parker In ‘I Don’t Know How She Does It’ Trailer. We Don’t Know How We Did It. [The Playlist]