Raising Helen - *1/2
Now Playing: (2004, Garry Marshall) [seen in theatre]
It's a funny thing about Garry Marshall- you see the guy in interviews or in bit roles in other people's movies, and he seems like some obnoxious uncle you don't really miss seeing regularly, but the stuff he directs feel like nothing so much as initiation devices used by women on prospective boyfriends (seriously, why is it that women need us to watch their sentimental tacky crap with them? I don't require a woman to watch 007 or Clint Eastwood movies with me. Anyway...). As far as Marshall's movies go, this certainly beats his other recent output, but that doesn't make it any good. A big problem here is that the supporting characters are so awkwardly-written that it's impossible to recognize much of anything about them. This is particuarly detrimental to Joan Cusack's performance- try as she might she can't make her character (the protagonist's soccer-mom sister) come to life in the film- sometimes she's the voice of reason, sometimes she picks up after her sister, sometimes she's bitter and envious, and at none of these times did the change feel natural, rather than foisted upon her by the explain-everything-twice dialogue. Also, the two younger kids, played by alien-like child actors Spencer and Abigail Breslin, are sitcom kids, supplying tart rejoinders and awwwwwww-itude respectively (older sister, played by Hayden Panettiere, isn't much better, but at least her character's grounded in some level of reality). None of which would have been quite so glaring had Helen herself worked, which I'm afraid she doesn't, since Kate Hudson is too much starlet and not enough actress to make the part her own- she's called upon to beam and fret and sob and glow, but it's so much Master Thespian Acting(!) The most glaring example of what's wrong with this movie is the scene where Hudson takes the kids to enroll at a new school, and she trades allegedly "cute" dialogue with a hunky pastor/principal played by John Corbett. She's trying to convince him that the family is Lutheran, and he jokes about all the blood tests, etc., required to verify one's religion, and this rang false to me because (a) finding a school for one's kids, especially for a parent in Helen's situation, really isn't a joking matter, and a man in his position would be sensitive to that; (b) the dialogue is so obviously scripted that had Marshall cast Meryl Streep opposite Sean Penn it still wouldn't have worked as either comedy or heightened realism; and (c) Kate Hudson and John Corbett are hardly Meryl Streep or Sean Penn. You get my point. And remember guys, when your girlfriend remarks that RAISING HELEN looks "cute", the correct answer is "yeah, sure, we should see that," because it's not like you really have a choice anyway (the dead-wrong answer is "yeah, you would think so, wouldn't you?", for those keeping score at home). You've been warned.