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The film’s Reddy works for an EMF not altogether unlike the EMF in the book. Here she is working on developing a project with one Jack Abelhammer, a British businessman living in New York played by Pierce Brosnan. (And just to carry out the comparison, Brosnan is approaching 50. Clooney, who the book’s character is compared to, will turn 50 this May. Is Brosnan the British Clooney? Not exactly, but the two are pretty good analogs of each other.)

Being a Hollywood gloss of a textured and complex British novel, the darker end of the story is eliminated. Yes, Reddy and Abelhammer develop feelings for each other, but here they are considerably more chaste. There’s no kiss here . . . no drunken night between the two of them that doesn’t involve sex. They’re simply spending a lot of time together. And Reddy’s relationship with her husband (played here by Greg Kinnear) is considerably less intimate than it is in the book. The book’s Reddy is reluctant to have sex with her husband. Here she wants to have sex with him, but she simply doesn’t have the time or energy to do so.

Eliminating the harshness of the darker end of things makes it all considerably more cheerful, but it keeps the drama from feeling entirely earned. The feelings that are supposed to develop between Reddy and Abelhammer don’t feel as authentic because they aren’t given much screen time. Reddy’s husband leaves her near the end of the book, only to tenuously return. Here that’s reduced to a harsh argument.

The problem here is that while the plot does a much better job of feeling structured and artificial, it lacks an authentic enough motivation to make the plot seem significant in any real sense. It’s a Hollywood plot that’s trying to cling to a story crafted by a British author with no real sense of plot structure. It falters. The last-minute things that are thrown in at the end are developed a bit more (and both given to Olivia Munn to handle, which she does a pretty good job of). Even with a bit more warning, those little bits that are added-in don’t feel any less artificial, but artifice is much more at home in a Hollywood movie than it is in any other form of narrative fiction, so it’s more acceptable. That doesn’t make it any more endearing, though. Parker’s Reddy is off to make snowmen with her children at the end of her story, successfully balancing work and family life with a husband freshly committed to keeping it all together. Real nice and everything, but it’s an ending formed on a film every bit as imbalanced as the book its based on.

The Verdict

The plight of young mothers in the business world is one that is truly worthy of a decent, well-crafted piece of narrative fiction. And while both the film and the book go a long way towards giving the struggle a voice, both Hollywood and novel writers everywhere have a great deal of work to do to craft a story that better frames the issues in a way that is both compelling and believably representational of the realities facing society as a whole.

Both book and movie are formed on interesting ideas and compelling characters, but both feel imbalanced in a very fundamental way that at least partially undermines the importance of the subject matter they’re trying to cover.

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