After yesterday’s romp with science fiction joy with In Time, we get a shot of something much, much different. Today we’re getting in touch with the regular half thanks to the crew out at Anchor Bay, who sent over a copy of I Don’t Know How She Does It for us to review for you. And while we may not know how she does it, we’ll be left to ask, do we even care?

We’ve all known her. She goes by many names: Supermom. The Miracle Worker. And in this case, it’s Kate Reddy, a woman who somehow manages to juggle work, home, and children by sheer force of will. But when work decides to ramp up the responsibility on Kate Reddy, requiring her to make some regular trips to New York, which in turn would leave her–who is essentially the lifeblood and nerve center for the entire home front operation as well as a good chunk of work–severely out of phase. And worse yet, Kate’s new boss is a powerful, charismatic gent who is giving Kate a lot of emotional support…and that makes things even worse.

This is life. Plain and simple, it’s life, and from a surprising variety of angles. We’ve got the working mother, the single mother, the frighteningly perfect mother, even some angles from the fathers, grandfathers, and single males too. And while this is a very well put together representation of real life, it’s going to be tough to watch this unless you’re absolutely committed to watching other people’s lives.

There’s plenty of domestic drama built in here, and more than a little economic drama to boot, and it shows us all the feet of clay that so much of the people we know actually have. We see how the frighteningly perfect mother is a lot more shallow than you’d think, how the perfect working mother manages to keep it all together through long hours of hard work and more than a little stress and strain, how the singles discover the joys–and the heartaches–of parenthood, and even how the office jackass manages to find out that swooping in to take credit at the last minute isn’t really a viable career path.

But the question of the day is, do you want to watch a movie that’s focused on actual people’s lives? Do you want to drop eighty four minutes–that’s how long this is, you know–on the Thompsons down the street, whose lives aren’t likely that much different from your own? If you wanted to see people doing what you’re probably already doing every day anyway, then why would you bother watching a movie? You could just, you know, go out and live your life.

At the same time, though, it will doubtless be comforting to a lot of people to look and see and be able to say to themselves, hey, someone else has these exact same problems that I do, and they’re doing all right. There’s no doubt you need to see that every so often just to remind yourself that you’re not alone, and on that end, I Don’t Know How She Does It will be something well worth seeing for all the mothers out there. Not to mention, of course, all the fathers who haven’t exactly been pulling their own weight.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives I Don’t Know How She Does It an eight out of ten. It’s hard to recommend seeing a movie that’s so much like life, but at the same time, it’s not hard to see that sometimes that’s exactly what people need to see: a slice of life that’s well put together, even if it’s not always in tact at the end of the putting together.