Review
RAISING HELEN
Starring Kate Hudson, John Corbett and Joan Cusack
Directed by Garry Marshall
Opens Friday, May 28
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With her cherubic smile and trickster’s eyes, Kate Hudson certainly proved she could portray someone both sweetly naive and tragically self-aware when she starred in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. But in Raising Helen – a movie that tries to be funny and poignant but is rarely either – watching Hudson do her trademark two-step of grinning and squinting for almost two hours quickly wears thin.
Hudson plays Helen, an "it" girl of near-mythic proportions – she lives in a funky Manhattan apartment, has a blossoming career at an elite modelling agency and parties into the wee hours every night. This is the sort of life the gods of Hollywood scripts like at the end of a movie, but not at the start of one, and soon Helen’s sister and brother-in-law die in a car crash, leaving their three children in her care. Cue the reversal-of-fortune, followed by the life-altering epiphany and that’s the gist of Raising Helen.
Not that movies like this have to be so bland. Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl played on a similar theme, but it was at least honest and heartfelt about it. For a movie about a single person being thrown into sudden parenthood, Raising Helen has disturbingly few dialogues between Helen and her new charges. Worse still, the exchanges that do exist are cursory and lack chemistry – the icy stares these kids possess would make a mafioso hitman proud.
The gravest misstep with Raising Helen, though, is the ludicrous lengths it goes to to make viewers fall in love with it. Its characters are calculatedly charming and the script slyly ends each of its tragic notes with a sight gag (including, unbelievably, its funeral reception scene). Perhaps I’m a sadist for saying this, but there just isn’t enough suffering here. Director Garry Marshall’s take on the emotional core of this story is far too light – he makes grief a one-day affair and single parenting as simple as a few stern words at the right time.
In his most famous movie, Pretty Woman, Marshall made prostitution look as innocent as a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Raising Helen, too, is a fairy tale hiding under its pseudo-dramatic veneer.
Do the characters live happily ever after? Of course they do. They never really knew how else to be. |
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